I've been playing a new game during my free time so that's why I haven't been online or doing any WAMBAGin'. I think the other two guys are dead though. I managed to pick up a copy of Ikaruga, the insane new shooter from Treasure and quite possibly the last game made for the Dreamcast. Now I'm something of a mild shooter enthusiast, something that I don't think many people know - probably because I don't often play them and I suck. But still, I do so enjoy them. This was a game I was looking at for a while, and when it was featured on Penny Arcade, I pretty much made up my mind. Like the good man Gabe says (gotta scroll down a bit), the game mechanics are certainly very cool, and the game is frickin' glorious. I suck big time, but it's still glorious. Two player co-op mode's insane as well, and I think it'd be more fun than two player MvC2 at Jill's house. With the skill level I'm coming up against with you monkeys though, it isn't saying much. I don't think it's anywhere close to Chu Chu status, but we haven't played it yet so that's yet to be decided for sure. Expect a drop in Yak sightings for the next little while...Ikaruga demands all my attention. It even sounds so cool! Ika-RU-ga!!! Ho ho ho!

9/29/2002 08:04:00 PM | Comments (0)

Ha ha, it's like 12:45, and I'm not even close to sleeping. Taking a quickly little break to reset my calculus-fuzzed-out-brain so I can send this evil problem set straight back to hell and be completely calculus free...before I get another one next week.

Realized that something was needed to break the uncomfortable silence that the comic created (because it was so good man - "youth-in-asia!?!"). So I dug out a slightly old news story, something about Snow White and the Seven Shao Lin? Wicked cool. I'm always up for some insane revamps of anything and everything. It's Ultimate Snow White!!!</bad comic-reference> With Yeun Wo-Ping directing, the martial arts element is guaranteed gold already. A Zhang Ziyi or Kristin Kreuk as Snow White would fill me with childish delight and giggles.

9/26/2002 12:47:00 AM | Comments (0)

THE BAG: Now With 50% Less Sense.
New comic out... today?

9/24/2002 10:17:00 PM | Comments (0)

Blizzard and Marvel? Diabloii.net reports that Blizz's parent, Vivendi, has acquired a licence to use Marvel characters in their games for the next ten years. Read that again. Need I say more?

9/24/2002 09:57:00 PM | Comments (0)

I was downtown yesterday...as I often am...because...I have...like school there and stuff...

I was downtown yesterday and stuck with nothing to do for three hours from 2:00 - 5:00. I have a physics practical scheduled there, but those are every other week. And since I had a math tutorial I needed to get to at 5:00, I had some time to kill. So just for kicks, I walk down to the grand daddy of all comic book stores in hopes of picking up some stuff.

I set off at about 3:30, thinking that it'd take me about half an hour to get there, so I still got a good half hour to sniff around once I'm there. Unfortunately, I've forgotten my watch at home in my mad dash to get out the door - it is a Monday after all. So through the day I'm relying on random strangers I past on the street to give me the time. And people in downtown Toronto are pretty friendly, so I didn't have much of a problem. Once I got there, I was curious about the time and how long it took me to get there, so I decide to ask someone. Now there were two guys by the comics shelf - one was this skinny chinese guy who was just flipping through various books looking for something to buy. And next to him was this huge black guy wearing a leather jacket reading an Ultimates trade paperback - I figure he's been there for like an hour already. For whatever reason that's completely lost to me now, I decided to ask the huge black guy for the time.

Me: Hi, sir?
Him: <keeps reading, doesn't even look at me>
Me: ...I just wanted to ask you for the time...
Him: <keeps reading, possibly wondering whether to eat me or not>
Me: ...if I could just bother you for a sec...
Him: <Pauses for 5 full seconds, looks over to see that, yes - I'm still there. Gives me the coldest, most evilest, and scary look I've seen in my life.>
Me: <has now sweat out a full two litres of fluid>
Him: It's four. <returns to reading>
Me: <harsely> Thank you sir. <gets the hell out of the store!>

Maybe it's just me and my half-sized backbone, but I don't ever want to bump into him again...so maybe I'll just never visit the shop for as long as I live. Comic book stores aren't supposed to be this scary - so I think I'll stick with good old faithful.

9/24/2002 12:15:00 PM | Comments (0)

Yes, I know the tagboard isn't working. So you can stop telling me - thanks. I run the tagboard off a server at my workplace because they have a speedy ASP server and the site traffic is fairly low, so the tagboard doesn't interfere much with it. So right now, the entire server is down. I don't know what's up, but I suspect it's nothing much and that it'll be up by Monday. If it's not...(and if I'm very unlucky) then I'll probably be called in to fix it, which may happen either Tuesday or Saturday. And if I am called in, I may play around with it a bit - a slight redesign or something doesn't seem out of the question. I may switch the tagboard server entirely also, since the current one doesn't have any FTP access so all the administration and fixing has to be done on-site. Which is somewhere close to downtown.

...not really sure why I shared all that, all you need to hear is probably "Tagboard down, up Monday." I can't do anything about the tagboard right now, so all you get is our fantastic blogs. And you can always carry out pointless Avril discussions through the comment system or something. Or just not talk about Avril, which is fine too.

Now here's my real blog. Had a crazy time today. Apparently, one of my uncles or some close family friend (whatever) owns or has very good access (whatever) to a building somewhere in Newmarket. One of the tenants used to run a Laser Quest before they closed down - however - the inside maze is still there and all intact, complete with black lights and neon paint. Now this is a wonderfully interesting situation, particularly when you have some ...paintball guns available - hee hee hee. So my cousin, who has a set of four paintball guns, called me and my other cousins up for some insane-Newmarket-in-the-dark-paintball-goodness. He has the low level pistol guns - not the hundred ball rifles. These only hold ten at once and you need to reload after every shot, which was actually better for this since we were in such close quarters and with so little people. So we played in two teams of two, wandering around the weird Laser Quest maze, making as little noise as possible, under only black lights. Pure insanity. If you could, imagine the last time you were in Laser Quest, except without the flashing guns and suits, the loud music, the numerous third graders, and with only four people. It's freakishly scary when it's so dark because you can only see the guy when he's right in front of you, and the shots sting like the devil (usually you're supposed to fire them in excess of 20 feet...we were like 5 feet away for most of the shots). Suffice to say, there was a lot of running, screaming, swearing, diving, jumping, and all the stuff you can't do in Laser Quest. This is truly, the most non-Chu-Chu-fun a man can experience.

9/22/2002 09:01:00 PM | Comments (0)

Score one for some form of originality, at least according to this, upping the combo meter to 3.

9/20/2002 06:14:00 PM | Comments (0)

...can't stop chaining...*gasp* - 2-HIT COMBO!!!

9/20/2002 05:27:00 PM | Comments (0)

They're not rabbits, but close!

9/20/2002 11:34:00 AM | Comments (0)

Now that we've finally broken the chain of Avril-related posts, I felt it necessary to tap out another combo - this time with weird rabbit related Flash pages. This one's actually like a few years old, but it's one of my favourite pages, and I'd rather no one miss out.

Now I realize that it's a fairly specific theme, so it might be hard to chain into another one. But you gotta try it anyways - combos are so important. And hey, if it doesn't connect you can always dash back and turtle for a bit and try again later. Or maybe call out the AAA assist and try to corner trap the sucker.

9/19/2002 11:17:00 PM | Comments (0)

I love Sprite's ads. They're hilarious. Do I drink sprite? Nope. Do I have a point? Nope.

Man, don't you hate it when special events just creep up on you and you forget about them? This year, Life-Threatening Allergy Day got me. HAPPY LIFE-THREATENING ALLERGY DAY BRIAN!! There we go. Oh, I also got a buncho kids who were online on ICQ to well-wish him too. Buahahaha.

9/19/2002 11:16:00 PM | Comments (0)

Fun for hours.

9/19/2002 10:51:00 PM | Comments (0)

I agree with everything Yak yakked about. And it's true that the only reason Branch gets less coverage than Lavigne is because of Avril's Punk Sk8er Gurl image. Well, that and the amount of advertising her record label is willing to pay for. Which brings my attention a the sad truth - the entertainment industry (and business too) is driven primarily by image.

That's right, Sprite, image isn't nothing. Speaking of Sprite, who's slogan is "Image is nothing. Obey your thirst" or some garbage like that. If "Image is nothing", why are you trying to create a hip image with a page like this, using celebrity endorsement ads? In actuality, Sprite is like any other capitalist-driven entity - it knows that image sells. Which is also most definitely true in the entertainment industry. Look at the most successful movies at the boxoffice. They're usually blow-em up, special effects laden action movies devoid of any thought, originality, or technical merit. Yet they make the most money (usually). Why? That's right, image. It's the way they advertise and "entertain". The commercials and flick itself are glitzy, fast, and explosive (usually with lots of explosions), which catches audience attention way better than some artsy sepia toned film using old greek music and running backwards and upside down at the same time would ever garner. I bet that the upside movie is better, but chances are it won't make as much money.

Now let's extrapolate that to the music industry. Teens and the general youth of the day crave exciting (and/or hot) faces to mentally imagine when listening to their favourite exciting (and/or hot) songs. It's the same as the explosive action movie. Logically, the more of an outrageous, energetic attention whore you are, the more heads you'll turn, and inevitably the more wallets you'll empty. Look at Eminem. His personality on "screen" is totally different from his real life. He plays the role of the big bad white rapper that pisses off everyone. And it works. His controversy makes him the moneys. Should we blame him for being hypocritical? True, you could say that his image doesn't affect his music, which is what we should be judging. And of course, image does affect popularity of the artist. In essence, you can't really blame Eminem for being a hypocrite. He lives in a pseudo-capitalist society. He wants to make money. If you could make a million dollars right now by telling a little white lie, would you do it? Probably. Why should we treat Eminem any differently than ourselves?

Which brings me to my point (yes, apparently I have one). I'm not here to talk about whether Avril or Michelle is the cooler artist (Avril), but why Avril is more popular. She understands the sad reality of life. Society is fickle. We are easily swayed, and are proverbial sheep. *looks up at name* Unlike Branch, she realizes that the more publicity you get, the better. And a quirky and fresh personality helps. Notice how many magazine covers feature Lavigne? How many feature Branch? Thought so. In entertainment, popularity is not always proportionate to talent. Many times, it's inversely so. Some rely on raw talent alone to get them to stardom. Fine, it's a noble goal. BUT, there are so many "talented" people in this world, and only a finite amount of songs that can be played on the radio everyday. Unless you're freakin' Orpheus, you statistically stand better chances by selling your image to augment your music (career).

We should lament not how artist X is more popular than artist Y because artist X breaks windshields with her guitar, but lament the fact that society likes artist X because she breaks windshields with her guitar, and not because she's talented. Unfortunately, to avoid this, we have to avoid mixing up music and entertainment. I'm not sure many people would want to do that.

9/19/2002 07:57:00 PM | Comments (0)

...uh...hearkening back to Emu's last post, the number of Avril Lavigne related posts seems unstoppable. I wanted a go too, since I had some things that I could talk about. But when I typed it all out it was almost as long as Emu's last article. So I just kept rambling and now it's about article-length. So another one for me. The only difference with my Avril-topic is that unlike my two chaps here, I don't actually like Avril Lavigne.

So I'm just going to throw it out here and see what happens. And if it's possible, I would rather not have Emu verbally rape me with his frickin' Vulcan powers of debate and logic. ...oh and what the heck - David Usher sucks. ...and so does his music. *BADOOMCHING!!!* HO HO HO!!!

"What's a WAMBAG?" she asks. Crude homophobic humour 'R Us baby!!! I love this site.

9/18/2002 11:16:00 PM | Comments (0)

Emu and I were talking today, and with the amount of Avril we've been mentioning recently, we think it would be prudent to convert the WAMBAG into an avril lavigne shrine cuz omg shes like so kewl ^_^.

Or not. I never knew I had that much horrible teen fangirl in me.

9/18/2002 04:55:00 PM | Comments (0)

Okay. Slightly hearkening back to Sheepy's last post below, he sent me this Avril bashing site. Rage...! Okay, so Avril Lavigne doesn't write her own songs (not by herself anyway), doesn't play guitar (very well), doesn't skate too dandy, and her music isn't really "punk." To all that, I say ...who cares? Whether you like it or not, professional writers have become a mainstay of mainstream music (refer to mainstream-hate by Sheepy below); lots of singers don't play guitar (all the time) (and just hold one when they're not); her skating skills do not affect her music; and genre is merely a label that does not affect the quality of music. (I should stop using semicolons as organizing devices, and stop blogging before I go to bed.)

So, the popular retort is that because she pretends to write her own songs, play guitar, skate, and be a punk rocker, she's nothing but a hypocritical marketing ploy. Well, Avril Lavigne is an entertainer, and it's not unheard of to have a stage persona that is different from the one offstage. Although it does seem that the onstage Avril is a quite a gross exaggeration of the offstage Avril, remember that no one is denying that she's a product of the media. It helps to think of her as a character on TV. So what if Avril Lavigne doesn't exist in real life? The one on the radio is a great character, with a good (albeit stale) message, good face, and good music. Honestly, isn't that what matters?

The thing that offends me is that the article accuses Avril fans of being "the brainless youth" who "eat [Avril's music] up, as they do with anything and everything they're spoon-fed by the media, top 40 radio, and the sadistic, brainwashing, greedy trend whores better known as MTV executives." Is everything that is popular called brainwashing? She's popular because her music is what many people like to hear. That should be obvious. The feat of serving up a hit single that appeases the masses ... is not a cakewalk. There's a lot of competition out there. Hence, her popularity is testimony enough. You may not like her music, (and I probably don't like yours) but a heckuva lot of people like it. And I think that's what the hardcore punk fans are pissed off about the most. Their so-called punk is becoming mainstream; everybody's hogging in on their music that they could've called obscure and underground. Funny thing is, they say Avril isn't even punk anyway, so what's the uproar? The way I see it, if people keep thinking Avril is punk, they'll never invade your secret little club of "real punk." You could still continue to believe yourself to be elitest. So what's the uproar?? Maybe you just can't tell 'em apart yourself, and all your hardcoreness is fake.

Or maybe I need to go to bed now.

9/18/2002 12:45:00 AM | Comments (0)

Hearkening back (vaguely) to Emu's music article, I was visiting a chat room yesterday, and the subject of Avril Lavigne popped up. Suddenly, everyone in the chat room started RAWRing and hissing. I heard all the usual arguments (ones that I too used before I became a "true believer"), including the "she's such a hypocrite" and "her music sucks just because" (but with numerous spelling and grammatical mistakes of course, this being a chat room). I don't get it.

When did it become hip to hate things that are hip for the sake of being hip? It happens all the time. Avril isn't a trend setter here. Limp Bizkit, Linkin Park, Britney Spears, and the list can go on and on. Now I understand if someone truly does not like a certain band's brand of music, but the sheer numbers of people that hate what's "popular" now (read what's "overplayed" now) is staggering, and not just in the chat rooms. People I know in real life seem to want to be "on the edge". And by doing that, they MUST hate anything that's popular, and love anything that's obscure.

I just wonder what will happen when being "on the edge" becomes more popular (as it already is). So will there one day be another elitist group that will hate popular music, which is in fact now obscure music, which other elitist groups liked only for the sake of hating popular music?

Ok I'm lost now.

9/17/2002 06:19:00 PM | Comments (0)

So I'm out of milk. And juice. And Coke. There is nothing to drink in my house - I refuse to drink water straight. So I dug around my cupboards and I fished out a half-filled Costco-sized Nestea Ice Tea drink mix that I don't remember buying. And I usually have pretty good memory of what goes in and out of the cupboards, since I'm sniffing around in there all the time. So that means it's like at least two years old. But they're just crystals right? And if it's in a sealed container, nothing can happen to it right? Also, I have the impression that bacteria don't like to hang out with crystals much. So what the heck? I'm thristy. And the best alternative is to put sugar in water. And I'm not quite ready to do that yet.

I think all this university stuff is finally catching up to me. Eating nothing but street vendor hot dogs, sleeping six hours a night, and all this "walking" business is messing me up. I think I have a cold. And I get this stabbing pain in my face whenever I drink that ice tea stuff. Not cool. ...oh wait. That's the spoon. Nevermind - another crisis averted!!! I rule.

Oh, yes, and we finally got a ghetto articles page up for you at the top left.

9/17/2002 02:48:00 PM | Comments (0)

I had Kraft Dinner for lunch today. *badoomching* Okay, it really wasn't KD, it was President's Choice because it was cheaper. Went to a friend's house to cook it. Well she cooked it because she was a girl and I am culinarily challenged. And it actually turned out like the picture on the box. See, whenever *I* try to make macaroni and cheese, it comes out with this milky soup at the bottom with flecks of cheese powder floating around and hunks of rotting fishhead. She made it taste good. I'm a lucky man.

9/16/2002 10:57:00 PM | Comments (0)

I guess this sorta ties in with Yak's 80's tribute... Kind of.

By the way, does its main site have the coolest news system or what?

9/16/2002 01:53:00 PM | Comments (0)

Are you a closet Avril Lavigne fan? Do you say you like Tool just to be sophisticated? Read this long post.

9/15/2002 11:09:00 PM | Comments (0)

I've added a quick little "link" for "The Bag" - our "resident" "web comic" - up in the top left "corner." It's not "pretty," but it collects all of the "comics" that have been "released" so far. All two of 'em. Eventually when I gets more "time" or a better "idea" I'll "pretty it up," but it should "suffice" for now.

9/15/2002 10:37:00 PM | Comments (0)

Sweet Saturdays. Managed to catch up on some sleep today, but in the future I'll need to plan my time a bit better. Gotta stop getting to bed at like 1:00 AM and stuff.

Well, I think I mentioned that I had a new article or something in an earlier post, and I'm going to post it up here now. I finished it up a while ago before school started, but as soon as it did start, I kinda forgot about it. It was just something I used to kill off my then plentiful spare time, and I'm not too sure how many people will understand the ideas and events behind it. But if you're here reading this, then you probably don't care either way. So beware true believers - witness The Return of the 1980's!!!

[cue dramatic lightning and ominous music]

9/14/2002 06:29:00 PM | Comments (0)

Time for more antics from THE BAG, featuring those Friendly Neighborhood Losers!!

Click here for the strip.

9/13/2002 08:23:00 PM | Comments (0)

It's so wrong, yet so right.

9/12/2002 10:15:00 PM | Comments (0)

Just got back from my first day of university. Whee.

Somehow yesterday through some bad time management and some goofing around, I ended up in bed pretty late - like 1:00 AM. Then...I don't know if it was nerves or something, but I couldn't get to sleep until way past 2:00 AM. So waking up at 7:00 AM to catch the GO Train only gave me less than 5 hours of sleep. Normally these things don't bother me much, I usually run pretty well with only a bit of sleep. ...if you could call the way I act running "pretty well." But if I had ever needed that sleep, it was today. I'm exhausted. In the first half of this day, I've done more walking than all of my summer combined. My classes aren't even that bad, there's only like 5 minutes worth of walking between each of them, which is relatively very good. But couple that with the 31°C weather, a 15 lb. bag of textbooks, and my pathetically poor physical condition - and you can understand a bit about what I'm whining about.

But aside from that, it wasn't as bad as I expected. Well, so far at least. It is the first day, afterall. And I had a collection of light courses today - haven't even hit my 3-hour night lecture for calculus. But so far it's not that bad - I only have one class tomorrow. If you compared the two, I'd say I most certainly faired better today than my first day of high school. I didn't know anyone in grade nine, but today I found that I shared my first two classes with some high school buddies. But even if I didn't know anyone in university for the first little bit, that's okay. With classes of hundreds of people from all over the province, no one knows anyone. So everyone's on equal ground pretty much. But in high school, usually the entire grade eight class makes it up intact from the feeder schools. And plus, I just plain hated high school. So...bottom line...I'm a freshman again. Whee hee.

I also have another "article" finished, but I'm just too tired and lazy to upload it and format it and everything. Maybe sometime later. Ugh. I'm going to rest a bit now.

9/09/2002 05:44:00 PM | Comments (0)

It's all in the bag baby! Check out the new comic here!

9/06/2002 10:20:00 PM | Comments (0)

The pleasures of no school - sleeping in past lunch to find that your mommy's gone out and didn't make you something to eat. I don't think you can beat a can of Pringles and a glass of milk for breakfast/lunch.

9/05/2002 01:41:00 PM | Comments (0)

Do you know what REAL Ultimate Power is? I thought not.

9/04/2002 08:18:00 PM | Comments (0)

Freakin' Greeks (well, their government atleast).

9/04/2002 05:47:00 PM | Comments (0)

Hello! I'm rather enjoying my extra week of summer, thanks. Apparently it's Frosh Week or something, but I thought I'd enjoy it better at home. You know, with the sleeping in and stuff like that. I'm starting Monday, at which point I'll promptly shut up about school in general.

A site update - if you haven't really noticed, I've tweaked the site just a little bit. Added a little navigation section over on the left above the tagboard. It doesn't do much right now because none of the sections are up, but when they are, it's going to be over there. The only thing I've done right now is add profiles for Assface and Jill, our lovely inactive members and 2/5's of The WAMBAG. In the days ahead I'll probably write up the Articles section along with some psuedo-articles to test it. I'll throw in my maritimes thing there and actual real articles should follow afterwards.

As for the mystery section, I'll leave that up to Emu and Sheep to finish up and tell me what to do with it. Should be interesting. Course, that'll have to wait until later, when THEY GET OFF SCHOOL!!! HO HO HO!!!

Edit: Oh yeah, added a Archives section too. This blog section displays the last 30 days of posts, and since The WAMBAG is not yet 30 days old, all the posts still show up. So when we post past September 5th, posts will start leaving the main page. If someone thinks its better to list less/more than 30 days of posts then leave a comment.

9/03/2002 03:06:00 PM

This is something that I've been hearing for months, but as long as we're on comic related posts I thought I'd throw it out here - just for kicks.

According to (very unsubstantiated) rumours going around, the whole Marvel universe is set to be ultimatized sometime in 2003. Now there are two different types of people. Those who understand what I'm saying and thus also understand the profound cosmic discord yet to come, and those who say "WTF, 'ultimatized' isn't even a word - Yak's choking on something strong." I'd rather you ask Assface about the details of "ultimatization" because I'm too lazy to explain it. Basically, it's kinda like DC's Crisis thing...but then again...if you don't know what the Ultimate line is you probably don't know anything about Crisis On Infinite Earths. ...simply put, it's a huge event to kinda tie up all the loose ends and clean the house of the old crappy characters no one loves. But thing is, it doesn't just kill off losers like Stilt-Man, it'd also kill off all the other books in Marvel continuity that people (like myself) read. And it'd also kill the old versions of Ultimate characters.

I'm still undecided on the issue. Ultimate everything would be kinda cool, giving new writers the ability to do...anything, and give new spins to old characters. That's always cool. But after they ultimatize everything, what will my fantastic comic knowledge be worth? Little kids picking up books at Walmart will be on equal ground with me!

Ah well. I've always got DC.

9/02/2002 10:34:00 PM | Comments (0)

SWAT meets Superheroes - X-Men 2, baby! Too bad, no Sentinel footage.

9/01/2002 03:29:00 PM | Comments (0)