Beardly

It's hard to relate the process of beard growth to those that lack the testosterone and appropriately-located follicles to experience it, but I'll try. You see, my job this summer was pretty strict about the facial hair . . . Even peach fuzz was cause for reprimand. But since my internship (or should I say internment?) has ended, I have totally let myself go. Free of the facial-hair regulations of the refinery, I now have some quality Chia-esque action going on, and despite the itchiness and my general homeless appearance, it feels fucking great.

I have always been an advocate for the beard, not only for style reasons, but also because shaving FUCKING SUCKS. The idea of gliding a hand-held instrument equipped with not one, not two, but THREE razors along my jugular has never sat well with me. I sympathize with you ladies out there, I really do. Because the amount of surface area you all have to shave is several orders of magnitude greater than ours. But keep it up, cause I don't like hairy bitches. Just Kidding!

Kind of.

It's funny, too, how something that sucks as much as shaving is a right-of-passage that so many kids look forward to. I don't really get it. I was never gung ho about the whole thing. When everything that those 1970s videos they showed us in gym class started happening to me, the desire to shave was furthest from my mind. In fact, my first "razor" was an electric--a method that I still embrace today for that permanent five o'clock shadow look.

From puberty to my 20-somethings, I thought it'd be fun to take a look at great moments in Michael Hash Facial Hair History. Think of it as a retrospect that celebrates the basic human right to be hairy as well a guide to facial hair done right. Here goes:



















Here we have the Post-Scruff. When combined with a t-shirt and an unkempt looking coif, it is UNSTOPPABLE in the clubs. Beat that, Mystery.















Oh, the Handlebar. Nothing SCREAMS jackass like this pro-wrestler/NRA member popularized classic. When displayed on the beach, it even manages to attract drunken-patchy dopplegangers. Go figure.














Yeah, this totally isn't me. It's some teacher-that-subbed-for's sad husband. This 'stache/glasses/feathered hair combo is the perfect example of what NOT to do.














What we have here is the Winterly, a perfect example of form and function in those cold winter months. Note the completely unnecessary UTEP headband and matching plugs.















The Lincoln tells everybody, "Hey, shaving is for suckers and I am NOT cool with slavery." Which are obviously good messages to send to the world. Snappy clothes and a shiny cardboard hat can really jazz up this particular look.














The Amish look is perfect for those that have a high level of contempt for mustaches and a fondness for butter-churning. Just remember to leave the horn-rimmed glasses at home.


So throw away your Bics and Shicks, because growing and maintaining your facial hair is fun and easy. Well, once you get past the Kevin McDonald Kids in the Hall sketch stage of growing it out, anyways . . . .

Road Rage

I was driving home from the far-side of town on Saturday night when an act of road rage got a little out of hand. I drive a very small, very light, very easily destructible car, mind you, and the perpetrator of this vehicular harassment was in a large, heavy, OLD Jaguar. I'll spare the details of my attack, but just know that the incident involved high-speeds, wet roads, and sudden breaking. In all seriousness, I was a little shook up by the whole thing.

Driving a car allows for moments of empowerment and freedom that can instantly turn into feelings of fear and helplessness, which some films have managed to recreate flawlessly. Almost getting destroyed by the clearly insane driver of a Jaguar got me to thinking about the best car-related horror movies out there. So queue up these classics on your Netflix with these classics, and please folks, if you see me driving on the freeway, don't try to kill me.


Duel, 1971
Duel was Steven Spielberg's first feature-length film which originally debuted on television in the 70s. But unlike today's Amy Fisher/Hallmark Hall of Fame piece of shit Lifetime Network movies, Duel was very (read VERY,) good. The film is about a greasy little businessman driving through what looks like Arizona and getting terrorized by a big-ass semi truck. There's some really good Hitchcockian paranoia mixed in with the visual flair that helped make Spielberg such a Holly Wood big shot. It's
available on DVD, and VERY worth checking out.


Breakdown, 1997
I love it when really good low-budget movies succeed. Breakdown did just that in '97, coming out of nowhere and knocking people on their asses with its oh-so-intense man on a mission to save his wife from psycho redneck truckers story. Clearly drawing inspiration from Duel in its opening scenes, Breakdown takes a sharp turn into what can be considered action movie territory. But even the explosions and gunplay never distract from the feeling of dread you get when Kurt Russel's wife disappears ten minutes in.


Joyride, 2001
So if Breakdown and Duel made baby (a baby that would likely grow up to dress in all black and hurt little animals,) it'd be Joyride. Joyride is a great movie, but it's certainly entertaining. The truck vs car Duel dynamic plus the relationship aspects Breakdown multiplied by slasher movie violence is the formula for the film's success. So if you can stomach Paul Walker's school of Keanu Reeves acting technique for a couple of hours, it's definitely worth your time.

BioShoXXX

The first drop of the 40-days and 40-nights-caliber storm of big games this fall has landed upon us. And I think the biblical muse I'm channeling would agree with me and say, "And it was good."

Ken Levine and the boys and Irrational Games gained their industry notoriety back in '99 with the release of System Shock 2. According to Wikipedia, the game was technically impressive, played well, AND was scary. Which are all things that most games today developed on fancy-pants Cell processors fail to achieve.

Being a console gamer, I completely missed out on the collectively decided awesomeness that was System Shock 2. But lucky for us console-types, visionary PC designers are making the jump to the console space and making some fucking amazing titles and--hopefully--some profit for themselves as well.

In pre-release interviews, members of the design team were adement in stressing that the game is a shooter. I suppose this was done to ensure sales, because typically ambitious abstractions fail to compete with regurgitated genres on the best-seller charts. It's sad to see a product that will likely be remembered for everything it accomplishes outside of combat be undersold as a shooter.

Though shooting is the vehicle that drives the BioShock experience, it is definitely not its strongest point. In fact, when compared to the Halo's of the world, BioShock is mechanically imprecise. But that doesn't make it any less fun. What BioShock lacks in solid shooting mechanics, it makes up for it's level and character designs.

The plausible impossible underwater city of Rapture and its inhabitants really suck you in. Each room is meticulously detailed and radically different from the next. This isn't your standard gun-metal hallway after gun-metal hallway typical sci-fi shooter level design here. There are constantly new things to see and nooks and crannies to explore.

Rapture is populated by several classes of citizens, all of which are rather creepy and decidedly fucked up. The main enemy characters are called Splicers. Splicers are essentially insane-mask-wearing-lead pipe-wielding-bible-hymn-singing psychos that lurk in the shadows and hunt in packs to take you down. They vary in degree of difficulty, and have a represent a moderately impressive AI behavior. There are times when they will retreat to save their own skins, but that's about the extent of it.

In addition to Splicers, there are the Big Daddies and Little Sisters. In a nutshell, Big Daddies are big and scary and mean and Little Sisters are ugly bug-eyed little girls that walk around poking corpses. Big Daddies are the steadfast guardians of the Little Sisters that will protect them at all costs. Each battle with a Big Daddy is as unnerving as it is exhilarating. When fired upon their docile yellow-lit helmets turn a fiery-red and they charge at you with screen-blurring speed. These fights are amazing at first, but wane in excitement as the game progresses due to their necessity and the game's they-won't-attack you-until-you-attack-them-mechanic. I often found myself completing the game's narrative-related tasks and ready to move on to the next section when an on-screen reminder prompted me to go back and kill the Big Daddies.

I'm well aware that I'm nit-picking, but when a game succeeds on so many levels it forces one to focus on the minutia. BioShock's only failings are its constant reminders to the player that it is, in fact, a videogame. The art direction, sound design, and story are all brought down by the conventions of the medium. Menu screen shuffling that disrupts the action, on screen prompts oblective prompts, a GTA-esque directional arrow, and the final "boss" encounter are all examples of how ambition like this can only go so far given the boundaries of the videogame language.

But is good? Fuck yes it's good, I'd even go as far as to call it great. A definite must-buy that you will not regret going $60 in the hole for. Gaming experiences like this are rare; when cinematic videogame envelope is pushed just a little farther. BioShock could very well go down as this console generation's Metroid Prime, and a higher praise than that I could not give it.