Rockstar Metal Mayhem review

Well my little darlings, Rockstar Metal Mayhem has moved on to other parts and I must say, it was TOTALLY FUCKING AWESOME. No lie. Despite the overwhelming heat and humidity that briefly interrupted my day, I had the time of my life. Straight Line Stitch lived up to everything I hoped for. Alexis was hott and an awesome singer, she really got the crowds riled up and the rest of the band kicked all kinds of ass all over the stage.

Even the bands I didn't get to fully enjoy such as All Shall Perish were completely epic. And then I managed to get really, really close to the stage when In Flames started up, that pit was beyond excellent. The mosh pits were all exactly how I remembered them from when I first started going to metal concerts, no assholes ruining everyone's time like what happened last year. Everything was just how it should be. Then the main stage started up featuring Megadeath, Godsmack, and last but not least Disturbed. These guys were off the charts, always thanking everyone for coming out and seeing everyone, playing kick-ass songs and really getting the entire crowd into it, and when I saw the entire crowd, I'm talking everyone in the pit, pavilion, and lawn. I was kind of disappointed that I didn't have enough money to go to a meet-and-greet this year, but oh well, everything was still completely awesome. And how much more could you really want in an all-day metal concert? Awesome bands, cool people, great mosh pits, cool merchandise, not to mention plenty of eye candy (wink wink), and an all-around great fucking time. And if the pictures shown here aren't enough to satiate your thirst for the metal experience there's plenty of videos for you all to feast your eyes on over on my youtube channel. Enjoy my darlings, til next time.

A New Artist

O.K. as I've repeatedly mentioned, I am actually able to go to Mayhem on Friday (takes a brief moment to freak out about how happy this makes me). This being so, I figured I'd check out some of the bands that were unknown to me who are playing this year, which is a lot of them. I happened to noticed that Straight Line Stitch is a band with a female singer. This doesn't happen very often with hardcore metal bands because most girls lack the vocals necessary to growl and scream. Well, my curiosity was piqued so I asked my friend Ben about them and he gave them a pretty good review. And he knows how picky I am with metal anymore. So I finally gave them a little listen and I was very happy with what I heard and saw...



Hot chick singer and pretty bad-ass musicians? I approve. For their info they seem to have a profile for everything except their own website, but you can find them on all the usual suspects (i.e. Facebook, Myspace, etc.) and for everything else their Wikipedia page covers the rest. It seems they formed all the way back in 2000 in Knoxville, Tennessee. They didn't get their current singer, Alexis Brown, until 2003 and their first album was self-released in 2006 called "To Be Godlike." After that they followed up with "When Skies Wash Ashore" in 2008, this time the album was nationally distributed. The song above is from their third album "The Fight of Our Lives" that came out earlier this year. So far I'm liking them and I got another review from someone who's already been to Mayhem and said they did really well live. I'd say they're definitely passing my test, what do you guys think?

When Nerd Tries to Go Maintstream

Let's venture slightly into the realm of nerd-dom for a while shall we? Subject of the day is the "American-anime" Avatar: The Last Airbender, why the series is awesome, and why the movie is downright horrible. This is mostly going to consist of the latter considering I just attempted to watch the film and only made it ten minutes in before I attempted to delete it off the face of my Netflix profile forever. Now the actual show started all the way back in 2005 (damn that makes me feel old) and told the story of a boy who was destined to save the world because he was the Avatar, or the sole person who could bend all of the elements. The big problem he faces is the leader of the Fire Nation wants to enslave the whole world and for the majority of the series his banished son, Prince Zuko, wants to hunt down Aang in order to be able to return home. The cast also features Katara, a young water-bender, and her brother Sokka. As far as entertainment, this series covers all of it; action, adventure, comedy,drama, romance, etc. I followed it obsessively for the three years it was airing and was thrilled and saddened at its conclusion.
When talk started of making the series into a movie, I was already skeptical, mostly because the majority of attempts at turning different cartoons into movies isn't very successful. This is normally due to time constraints and things like it. When I heard that M. Night Shyamalan was going to direct it, my hopes fell further. The cast slowly started to emerge on the internet and the doom of the film seemed complete already in my eyes. When The Last Airbender finally reared its deformed head in theaters I flat-out refused to pay to see it. Well, I finally gave in to curiosity and watched it on Netflix... Oh, for the love of the Goddess was it bad. I mean Shyamalan couldn't even get the pronunciation of the names right. Besides that they plot was rushed, the dialogue was horrible, and the character development was practically non-existent. See this is why people who don't have an understanding of things like this need to take a step back and think for a minute rather than just rushing into it and making themselves look like a total and utter fool.

One Hell of a Game

This game's been out for a while, I know, but I just love it. Dante's Inferno. I mean, come on, you get to kill the Grim Reaper within the first five minutes of game play and then you steal his scythe to go and kill all the little demons with. Not to mention just the fact that they made a game based loosely off of The Inferno by Dante Aligheri makes an English major like me want to jizz my pants. Now a lot of people's major gripe about playing Dante's Inferno is that it's just too much like God of War... People like Yahtzee from The Escapist.

The Escapist : Zero Punctuation : Dante's Inferno

O.K. it might be, but the fact that Yahtzee and the rest of the staff got rickrolled by EA for this review is nothing short of hilarious. And nevertheless, this game offers some pretty disturbing images for those who are of a depraved mind like me. All the rest of the game is a load of frustration and a bunch of "Ah ha" moments when you recognize certain of the damned from mythology and Bible verses and such. But it's all still fun, especially the part where little demon babies with knives for arms start skittering around cooing and trying to chop your legs off right out from under you.

Just to Make You Lol Til You Die

No this does not serve any real purpose other than to make the masses laugh. Yes, Begley brings up a valid point about how money is wasted on pointless studies. But I don't really care about that, watch and enjoy.

P.S. There's a PG-13 rating for this one...

Joyous Day

My little blood-sucking darlings, I have some EXCELLENT NEWS. I'm going to Rockstar Metal Mayhem after all!That's right, I will be able to be your full reporter for the entire event on July 29th. There will be videos and photos galore for you to feast your hungry eyes on once it's over and I get to my computer. I am so incredibly excited for this considering I get to see not only Disturbed and Godsmack but also Megadeath along with all the other bands that have some set-time. As a reminder you can go and get your own tickets if you want to go on the Rockstar Metal Mayhem site. Hope I see some of you there!

Another Day for Alternative Anime

Despite the fact that Netflix has turned to the money-grubbing, price-raising, dark-side of the scale, for the moment I'm still able to enjoy their streaming videos and thus I was lead to another anime series to get hopelessly addicted to. Black Butler is a series about orphaned 12-year-old Ciel Phantomhive who also happens to be the head of a very large toy company and his ever faithful and demonic servant, Sebastian Michaelis. Basic rundown of how that happened follows as thus; Ciel's parents got killed, he was dying, Sebastian offers to serve him and help him take revenge in exchange for his soul, Ciel agrees and there you go. The series isn't overly long, only 24 full episodes, so it's an easy and short-lived addiction at least. Nonetheless, you can't help but fall in love with Sebastian as naughty as he is (hell, every other female in this series seems to). I'm not sure how it's managed to evade me so long since the anime was originally released in 2008 and the manga came long before it in 2006. And it doesn't hurt that the series has some of the best music attached to it I've ever heard. The opening and closing titles fit SO well with the mood. Don't believe me? Take a listen to the song Lacrimosa by Kalafina, which is the ending theme...



If you get the chance, definitely give this series a look. The ending isn't what you'd normally expect and some of the additional characters are hilarious.

When You Can't Be Yourself

Plenty of Goths have had this problem. You're trying to find a job, whether in the business world or just a retail job to get yourself some money while getting through high school or college, and the first thing you need to worry about? Your tattoos and piercings. I've been on a few job interviews trying to break my way into the business world so I'm not stuck selling useless crap almost every single weekend. The most recent one I had mentioned that I would have to take out my lip ring (keep in mind I already had a clear stud in both my lip and nose) but that I could keep a stud in my nose. These rules were actually part of their "dress code." Now dress codes have always irritated me from the time I was high school, mostly because the teachers and principals in my school liked to make up bullshit rules about why Goths couldn't wear what we liked, but when it came to all the little preppy girls in short skirts and low-cut tops they turned a blind eye. Even in retail the "dress code" rules you encounter tend to get ridiculous.
Now the majority of these rules are so the employees can look "professional." I'm sorry, but any business that is open beyond 7pm at night and open every weekend is nothing professional. It's grunt work at best. Now when you actually get into the business world, let me ask you this... Does your appearance have any impact on how well you do your work? No, in fact some of the more "professional" people I've seen throughout my retail experience have been some of the laziest. In my opinion, it seems nothing short of biased that a company can turn a candidate away just because they have bod mods. For all they know, that candidate could be a far better worker than any of the "normal" candidates that came in.

The Crow... The Series?

So I came across an interesting find today while being my usual reclusive self, sitting in my room with the blinds closed and flipping through channels. As I'm clicking, I see a familiar title... The Crow. Now of course I'm thinking of the film where Brandon Lee plays the incredibly talented (and incredibly good-looking) musician Eric Draven who gets killed along with his fiancee thanks to some local gang-bangers on a mission from the boss (Michael Wincott). Instead of staying dead like he's supposed to, Eric comes back with the help of a crow to take revenge on everyone. A little bit later he gets some help from the still living, a girl named Sarah and Detective Albrecht. He eventually kills all the bad guys and gets to return to the land of the dead and be reunited with his love.
Well the series seems to be taking it one step further in addition to adding its own subtitle. The Crow: Stairway to Heaven tells essentially the same story, except that Eric doesn't get the pleasure of going back to being dead. Instead he has to stick around and dispose of all the other baddies lurking around the city. From what I can see of the episode so far, its trying to just draw out the inevitable conclusion that Eric has to go back to being dead at some point. The lines are witty and snappy, but just a tad overdone. And Eric doesn't apply his own makeup, it magically appears when he has to go all vigilante and it looks like he has to do some sort of ritual to bring on the undead powers he possesses. It's not horrible, but its nothing to set the DVR to either. But hey, at least they got a guy who sort of looked like Brandon Lee to take the main role.

Why Do Goths Want to be Antisocial? Part 1

There is a long and almost never-ending list of reasons that would cause goths to want to avoid the populace at large. Granted for the most part we do have a shorter fuse than most when it comes to being around others, but even that being so, we have valid reasons for all of it. Take, for example, what I encountered today while at the mall. Now me and malls don't tend to mix in the first place, but add into it a screaming baby and a mother just sitting there and blissfully ignoring it while the other people around her are trying to enjoy their food, massive irritation happens. This is something that I think everyone can relate to, right? I mean, come on, it's a BABY. If it starts crying that means that something is wrong. Shouldn't your first reaction be to pick it up and figure out what's wrong? Seems pretty natural to me. But it seems this newest generation of parent seems content to let other people deal with their children. Case in point, the woman's mother was the one who eventually got the baby out of the carrier and tried to figure out what was wrong. Take responsibility for your kids people. You might be content to block out your baby's crying, but the people around you shouldn't have to in order to enjoy their lunch or dinner or whatever.

Band Spotlight - I:Scintilla

This is a band that I've personally seen in concert and make no mistake, they are awesome. Their singer is talented, hot, and a total sweetheart. They originated in Chicago, IL in 2003. Just a year later they self-released their first album and by 2006 they started gaining notice and were able to release the EP of their first album Havestar. Their first full-length album was entitled Optics (which was also the name of the tour I was able to see them on) and released in 2007. Since then they've released another album that I regrettably haven't been able to acquire yet called Dying and Falling. Thankfully though there are plenty of youtube videos available for a lot of the songs on I:Scintilla's youtube channel. And for even more information on them you can always go to their official website. And if you happen to be really impatient you can always check out these videos...