ALIVE INSIDE

So according to my notes I haven't written here in a bit. Here's something of an explanation and some new content as an apology. The death of Robin Williams is kinda lighting a fire to do more with my creativity and doing what I love. I'm also getting an early start on the holidays (and no that doesn't mean Christmas shopping, by that I mean getting fleshed into gear for the Wicked Season again and early for once.


So without any more further ado, here's the catchup of the last few months! 

Impression of what looking for updates
on here looks like to my readers

8 months... wow. I'm really sorry everyone. What started off as a bit of a depressing year for me has finally turned itself around. I ended last year feeling a bit crushed but eager to move forward with the latest transformation in my life... and it transformed alright... big time... in all  honesty it's left me feeling a lot like Bruce Campbell in the end of Evil Dead II, grey hair and all.

That's no special effects, that's his actual hair
The shoot was so traumatic it left him grey for a while

Now that I've had time to process all of the events of the last few months I'm able to finally go into some highlights! Right at the end of the year I started talking to a woman I'd been loosely acquainted with, now we've been together about 6 months and it's awesome. Our first date? Green Jellö here when they came to Seattle. She wanted to hear their infamous classic take on the 3 Little Pigs:


I wanted to hear Carnage Rules from the Maximum Carnage game from my Super Nintendo days:


I walked right up to Dustin, the guitarist and asked, "Hey, does Carnage still rule?"
He looked at me blankly, "The line goes, Listen all you fools, don't you know that Carnage rules?"
I respond, "Oh I know the line, I'm asking a question," with a vicious grin
He looks back at me knowingly and lifts a sheet of paper, covering all but one line and says "I dunno, you tell me..."
There it was, "Thank you!"
My night was made!
...almost!
After the show was done we got to chat for a second with Bill Manspeaker

Green Jellö - down with the man!

 he even signed my Venom shirt and Green Jellö'd it for me!

Not a bad first date! Second date was even better... since it was even more long-awaited... (that actually is deserving of it's own article though I'll touch on it briefly here)
For years I'd awaited the return of my King and God. This year was his second coming: Godzilla returned and with a vengeance! Ever since the shadowy smokey outlined teaser photo I'd been chomping at the bit to see Big G back again. After a day of excessive stress and ridiculous amounts of running around the lady and I managed to escape with enough time to enjoy a sushi dinner before retiring to the theater to catch the first early screening of Godzilla in IMAX 3D (a first for me, as the last movie I'd seen in IMAX has been at the Pacific Science Center about penguins and the last 3D movie was It Came From Outer Space on a double bill with The Creature From the Black Lagoon at the Pantages in Tacoma when I was a kid).
Having the THX - The audience is now listening audio calibration for the theater be Godzialla's roar was something specatcular. It reminded me of the old Maxell commercials with the guys hair flapping in the breeze.


Except it wasn't Wagner... oh no... ho ho ho... it was this blessed sound:


If I wasn't ready for the movie before, I sure as shit was now!!
So in short, things with my lady have been awesome. But with her came extra responsibilities, two of them, aged 11 and 16. Having one of my own, I had never really considered more but gladly took them on... and man are they cool!

So, like any 11-year old, when I met this one, he was sat in front of the TV with a controller firmly in hand. However, what was on-screen immediately caught my attention:

He was making like a one-man threshing machine through a horde of zombies not unlike this one, I sat down intrigued.
"Whatcha playing?"
"Black Ops Zombies," came the monotonic answer
"Do they ever stop?"
"Nope,"
"Can you win?"
"Nope, they just keep coming,"
"Ah,"
Silence for a few minutes before he's overwhelmed and he is defeated.
"You want to try?"
A kid asking Me if I wanted to play videogames, and one involving zombies. I knew already I was gonna like this guy.
"Yes, yes I do want to play!" suffice to say I sucked the first few times I played, hell only after a few months do I actually have the hang of it and I blame him for my Call of Duty addiction now, especially Zombies. But suffice to say when I'm not actively achievement hunting, shooting zombies is a favorite pasttime.

So the quick backstory on Zombies is as follows:
In Call of Duty: World at War there was an extra game mode called Nazi Zombies that had you stuck in a German bunker deep behind enemy lines with hordes of the undead Third Reich trying to break in, the level was called Nacht der Untoten (Night of the Undead in German) and featured WWII era weapons and no dialogue from the characters. More map packs would become available by way of DLC, but it wasn't until these were released that there became an actual story to the side-game (which, again, is going to be coming up in another post).

Some DLC even features some VERY familiar faces, and my favorite level of the game... how does trying to take out a zombified George Romero sound? The game is terrifying and definitely helping re-hone those twitch responses... nothing like having a horde go from shambling to full on cheetah sprinting at you! But thanks to junior I can play videogames again... hell I partially justified picking up the rest of the CoD series since i knew he'd get in on this soon enough too!

The 16-year old is a blast too, she gets on so well with my 4-year old as a big sister. The other night she came over out of boredom and we ended up watching Beetlejuice. I got to deliver a running commentary on the SFX, the origins of the PG-13 rating, and why this movie probably wouldn't be good for her to try to show at the daycare for kids (I could just see angry phone calls over the nightmares it might cause or if a parent were around in time for the "NICE FUCKING MODEL!" classic line).

NSFWWK (Not Safe For Working With Kids)

She also mentioned how much she loved Tim Burton movies, especially Winona Ryder in Beetlejuice and Fairuza Balk in The Craft. There was also a great discussion about how Candyman freaked her out (the 3x repetition of Beetlejuice brought it up) and how the original Bloody Mary story did too which lead to conversation about the Alvin Schwartz Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark books, ironically.

"You mean I could've been secretly a goth this whole time??
Bring on the Bauhaus!"

I never figured this 16-year old gymnast could secretly be a horror movie lover too, who knew! I love my adopted horror family, and with the Season coming up... I really can't wait!