What if God Were Real and Awesome? Oh, that would be ActRaiser.

I’ve been playing a lot of ActRaiser on my Wii Virtual Console recently. If you don’t remember ActRaiser – you unlucky son of a gun – you play God. Yep. And I don’t mean, oh, you play God in a sort of SimCity / The Sims / Guitar Hero on Hard sort of way.

Nah, dawg, nah.

You’re God.

Yeah, my people be content and shit.

Your job is to create a livable landscape for your followers. The better the landscape and more friendly it is their houses and Pizza Huts, the more they worship you. The more they worship you, the more power you get and the more you can rain down the terror!

Earthquakes, hurricanes, dogs and cats, living together. You can do it all.

And here’s the thing.

Once in a while, you’ll find out that there’s some evil dude fucking up your people’s shit, yo. And guess what you do, as God, the almighty creator of everything?

You go down there, take a sword, and you beat their asses.

Those demons won't be laughing when they realized they fucked with the Jesus.

The game switches from an overhead view of a village to a side-scrolling chop-‘em-up. You play the almighty, swinging your sword at bats and shit to keep your followers happy and safe.

Do you realize what I’m saying?

You’re not some prince-of-peace bullshit. You’re the Jackie Chan of Jesuses. You’re the Cassius Clay of Christs. You’re the Macho Man Randy Savage of Messiahs. And he woke up on the wrong side of the infinite.

If God were real, and if God were awesome, he would be the God in ActRaiser. He’s not some pansy in the sky asking for your praise and never delivering the goods. He isn’t some “I hear all prayers, sometimes the answer is no” charlatan. If you go to the God in ActRaiser and ask him to bring down the pain on a neighboring village of kobolds, motherfucker’s going to give a brother a hand.

How can this get any better?!

Oh, what’s that The Awesome Fairy? You say that you also get a cherub servant who fires arrows? That’s right. Where’s his harp? Oh, I don’t know – he’s too busy killing motherfucking demons with holy harpoons to play Amazing Grace. Sorry. Check back tomorrow after he’s cleared the world of evil.

Remember when you were a kid in church and you were like, “Can God make a rock so big even he can’t lift it?”

Yes, this God can. He’s that good.

Buy ActRaiser on Wii’s Virtual Console. Or emulate it. Now.

The Music Novice - 8/13/07 - "Nevermind"

Here we go. This is the first post in a series of posts - something you might call a "posting series" - I plan to do in which I listen to and review albums I've never heard. But everyone else has.

First up for this blog is Nevermind by that oh-so-lovable boyband, Nirvana.

Okay.

First of all.

What the hell is Kurt saying? I can't understand a goddamn word. Everyone I talk to says Mr. Cobain was the ultimate singer/songwriter/social poet of his time. But I literally can't understand most of this. So let me look up some lyrics.

I'll take one lyrical selection from the song, "Breed."

Ah-hem.



I don't care if I'm old
I don't mind if I don't have a mind
Get away from your home
I'm afraid of a ghost



What?

Now, I'm not one for literal pop-lyrics about love and "doing" a dance such as "the twist." At the same time, listening to this album feels like listening to a really bad piece of teen poetry from the 90s.

All of the songs are like this. They all have the same quasi-thoughtful lyrics we all wrote after some girl or guy told us they were flattered by our advances, but would rather date someone of their financial / aesthetic class level. Here, right now, I'll write my own Nirvana lyrics.


Sometimes I hate the sun
It hurts my eyes I think
I hide inside to keep away
It's just another manic Monday


I'm not trying to be funny here as you might think. I'm trying to wrap my head around how this music was such a big deal to so many people.

Maybe I'm attacking this music thing from a bad angle. Maybe this music I never heard should be considered on the same level as any album I haven't heard. At the same time, it's hard to not be let down when everyone I know tells me this is the biggest album since Sgt. Pepper's and how it changed the face of music in the 90s.

Really?

Again, I'm trying to avoid being funny here. I'm not making a joke to rile up some angry blog comments. I'm actually trying to see how this music got under people's skin.

Maybe I'm too old? I'm only 23, but I didn't hear this in high school when my parents didn't understand my art and my father wanted me to be a coal miner like him but I told him I was getting out of that town and listen to my music, this is different rock and roll!

And maybe I just grew up in a slightly different time.

In all, there's a couple songs here I'll probably listen to again. However, after being told again and again I was missing a slice of life, I find listening to Nevermind a largely unexciting and - oddly - noncathartic experience. Maybe like most pop-music trying to be deep, this belongs with its time period and is loved for that reason.

Comedy Dream

I rarely write about my dreams, except when they're comedy related. And since whenever my dreams are comedy related, they're bad dreams, comedians can enjoy reading them all the more.

Ah-hem.

The dream opens with me at some weird bar / comedy club combination. We're putting on a show for my birthday. I must be a real narcissist in the dream world, hoo-boy! Anyway, it's the normal group of people, and the headliner is Joe DeRosa, a man who I’ve met never and has no real reason to want to perform at my party.

I'm talking with the owners of the club, these two brothers, and they keep asking me if I'm from Intel or Microsoft because, apparently, both companies have brief twenty-minute shows they're doing for their company. That's right: twenty minutes.

I say "no," and they tell me everything's set. Woo! Party!

The show starts and no one shows up. A few people wander in from the bar and watch as if watching comedy was the last thing they wanted to do that day or any other. Comedian after comedian bombs, and bombs hard. No one's having a good time here. No one’s laughing, the mic isn't working, just a terrible, terrible show.

Wait.

Suddenly, all these roadies storm the stage and start unpacking all their equipment. And for some reason, no one's stopping them, no one's asking any questions. Boom. They begin playing this hardcore metal. People stream in, everyone's having fun.

But the show hadn't finished. I hadn't gone on stage and neither had Joe DeRosa. So I go up to the owners. They tell me, "Hey, man, you and your Microsoft buddies got your twenty minutes." I told them I wasn’t from Microsoft – this was supposed to be a ninety minute show.

"Oh, man, I'm sorry. We must have overbooked. Anyway, you still owe us three hundred dollars for the room."

"Hey, oh, I thought we were splitting the receipts from the door?"

"Yeah, but you got no one in, and we need to recoup our costs."

"But you cut my show off seventy minutes early!"

And then, I suppose the moral of the dream, the club/bar owner says, "Maybe you'd be a bit further along in comedy if you really understood how the system works."


How true, subconscious. How true.

Pandora

I know – as is the case with all things music – I’m the last to know about this, but if you haven’t sign up for Pandora.

This service is free and it’s fucking stunning. A friend was telling me about it and he said how they don’t have a lot of major musicians, they have good recommendations. So they might not have the Rolling Stones, but they probably have a musical group with a similar style.

I signed up and to be a dick, my first guess was "Weird Al Yankovic." And the program’s like, "Nah, I’m sorry, we don’t have that. We don’t carry much humor. Here’s something, however, that we calculate is musically similar."

And it fucking rocked.

Out of the past seven songs, six have been a perfect fit.

And the one miss was an eighties pop song. Which, all things considered, not too far off.

King of Kongs

Here's the trailer for King of Kongs.

I saw this while I was at SNL - one of the writers had an early copy. It's easily the best movie I've seen all year. Trust me on this.