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.

Maybe in Retrospect I Should Have Said "Country"

Among the hardcore, it's been unanimously decided that Donkey Kong Country was not a good game. The fanciful pre-rendered characters and backgrounds made for some of the most delicious eye candy around back in '94, but has since become inedible.

What Rare Ltd achieved with the original DKC was precisely what they set out to do, which was prove that the SNES was capable of major graphical feats, and could still be a viable competitor against 32-bit machines. There was a skeleton of a game there, for sure, but its apparent now that the Brits simply read the platform game Cliffs Notes, threw in a bunch of big words, and got by with an A.

The smoke and mirrors used made it easy for me to forgive the game's lack of depth (the fact that i was 11-year-old helped too.) I remember when that mysterious VHS tape in a leaf-covered box came in the mail. I was totally blown away. The propagandists at Nintendo Power really knew how to put together a promo video. The whole thing was less than 20 minutes long, and showcased only a tiny glimpse of the gameplay. But the graphics--my God, the graphics--aroused me more than the Playboy magazines under my older brother's bed.

Being the income-less 11-year-old that I was, I was forced to beg my mom for the game. It's release was slated for November, which meant I would have to wait until Christmas. Damn Nintendo and their marketing prowess . . .

Needless to say, it was a very happy Christmas, indeed. I played the game backwards and forwards. I made it my goal, my mission, my LIFE to find all the hidden bananas and bonus stage barrels. I remember playing the snow level over and over . . . you know the one, where the snow fell lightly at first and then became thicker and thicket as you progressed through the level? Yeah, that's the one.

The immediate success of DKC warranted a sequel, and Rare had a quick follow-up ready for release just one year later. This time around, they lacked the "holy shit!" factor that the original had. The visuals were simply cleaned up, but the gaming community's reaction barely registered on the Richter scale. Sony had released the Playstation several months earlier, and gamers were already beating off to the jagged polygonal race cars of Ridge Racer and blocky humanoid combatants of Battle Arena Toshinden. Suddenly it seemed hard to care about a monkey jumping on reptiles and collecting bananas--especially considering the game's title character wasn't even playable.

The blokes at Rare must have come down with a case of Mad Cow disease, because the direction they took with DCK 2 made no sense. Removing Donkey Kong, perhaps the most recognizable figure in videogames next to Pac-Man, and replacing him the with the ridiculously designed Dixie Kong is a travesty. Dixie is essentially Diddy Kong in drag, and her long blond ponytail acts as a sort of auxiliary appendage, capable of lifting barrels over her head and tossing them at enemies.

Dixie's hair also gave her the slow-descending ability, which had become a platform game staple in the years following Super Mario Bros. 3. This occurred when Dixie spun while falling, turning the ponytail like the propeller of a helicopter. It all makes perfect sense.

Besides the superfluous Dixie, Rare began what would become its downfall: collecting tons of meaningless bullshit. In addition to bananas, in DKC 2 you collect banana coins, Kremlin coins, balloons, golden letters that spell out the word "KONG," and feathers. It's a cheap way to add longevity and replayability to a game that Rare eventually perfected.

I played DKC 2 quite a bit during its initial release, but never owned a copy. What it lacked the charm and uniqueness, it attempted to make up for with lame characters and frustration. It amazes how that DKC 2 is widely regarded as the best the game of the franchise. Because even now that I am old enough to realize the original game's flaws, it still has that nostalgia factor going for it, which counts for a lot.

Despite its shortcomings, DKC 2 was still wildly popular, and like any entertainment product that returns even a $1 profit, a sequel was made. By now, the whole monkeys grabbing bananas while shooting out of barrels schlock had gotten really old, and I never knew a single person who owned the game. And get a load of the character designs here: the shit-fest Dixie returns, and this time instead of Diddy or Donkey, she's brought along Kiddy Kong. Yes, Kiddy Kong. Words cannot bring justice to the loathsome feelings I have for this character, so I'll just wrap it up here.


It's sad to think that the game that single-handedly saved the SNES from an early grave went down in history as such a dud. If Rare had just managed to squeeze an actual game in between all of those graphical tricks, then the SNES could have went out with a well deserved bang.

T9--The "T" Stands for "Truth"

Being the socially awkward poor conversationalist that I am, I immediately embraced text messaging as my preferred method of communication so many years ago. At first it was a little weird . . . New rules of etiquette had to be established. Is a text impersonal? It's too late to call, but is it too late to text? I just met this girl, would it be weird if I text her before I call her? Etc., etc., etc.

Years later, I still text more than ever. In fact, there are some people that I have never once spoken to on the phone, yet have carried on lengthy full-text conversations with. In fact, texting is so important, that when I left ass raping T-Mobile, text plans were the FIRST thing I took into consideration.

Texting to the degree of intensity that my friends and I do requires the use of T9. You know, predictive text--that magical little function that makes texting fast and easy. According to Wikipedia (also known as the never-wrong fountain of knowledge,) T9 is short for Text on 9 Keys. This program not only makes texting easier, but just so happens to reveal some eerie truths about life. The validity of these truths is proven by the fact that certain combinations of key presses form words that are linked together in ways that defy coincidence. Here are a few examples:

4663=GOOD=HOME
This is an easy one. Home is GOOD. No matter if it's your childhood home, or the new home that you've made for yourself, everybody loves their home. And that is . . . good.

5477=LIPS=KISS
Ah yes . . . the infamous kiss/lips example. Once in a drunken rage of chauvinistic stupidity I sent Bob a text bragging about a makeout conquest that read, "I'll lips anything that moves!" The rest is history.

2665=BOOK=COOL
This one used to ALWAYS infuriate me. I say "cool" hundreds of times a day, but when the fuck do I ever say "book?" Well, that was until I discovered that books are in fact cool. Yes, the genius of J.K Rowling has helped me to become a literate member of society and a regular reader of books . . . that are cool.

5437=KIDS=LIES
Oh children . . . Always LYING. And parents too, always lying to their kids and lying to themselves about being good parents. It's a vicious circle of lies that's existed ever since the first monkey man made sex with the first monkey woman and proof, once again, that T9 knows all.

2625=ANAL=COCK
This one just makes me laugh.

Pac-THIS

Arriving right in between the Space Invaders quarter-shortage-inducing craze and the medium-evolving Donkey Kong was Pac-Man. It's colorful graphics and extremely simple gameplay made it appealing to everyone from overweight children to successful businessmen. I was too young to experience the pop culture phenomenon that ensued firsthand, but its reverberations can still be felt today. To many, the word "videogame" brings to mind a mental image of the little yellow glutton cruising around mazes and avoiding ghosts. It's synonymous relationship with the medium is particularly amazing given the fact the game is almost 30 years old.

A couple of weeks ago, original Pac-Man developer Namco revitalized the series with the release of Pac-Man Championship Edition on Xbox Live Arcade. Arriving just as the Halo 3 Beta was drawing to a close, Pac-Man CE was like a gift from a benevolent God that I'm still not quite sure that I believe in (though the quality of the game sure does make a strong case for the existence of the big guy.)

Pac-Man CE maintains the charm of the original visually, with extremely simple character sprites that would've been right at home on an arcade board in 1979. The mazes were jazzed up a bit with a glowing vector-graphics effect that works extremely well. The entire maze is still contained within one screen, and thanks to the dominance of HD TVs it's a widescreen.

The gameplay has only a few subtle differences that when combined create a fast, frantic experience. For example, in the original, once all of the dots were cleared within a maze the action would stop. The player would be rewarded with a much-needed rest before the screen would black out and a new maze generated. In CE, the maze is divided into left and right sections. When all of the dots on one side are cleared, a piece of fruit appears on the opposite side. Eating the fruit replenishes the dots on the opposite end and in some cases changes the layout of the maze. This is done seemlessly, leaving absolutely no break in the gameplay.

Games can be played in a variety of modes, which vary in five or ten minute intervals. The timer and score chasing make for a perfectly old-school arcade experience. I can't really do the game any justice here, the incredibly addictive gameplay must really be played to be fully understood. But if words are your thing, there's no shortage of enthusiast press on Pac-Man CE. Everyone from 1up.com to Penny-Arcade has covered has covered the game at length.

If you have a 360, buy it. If you don't have a 360, then you should just go ahead and end your life right now.

Grand Theft Autonomy

There's only one thing in the entire world that I hate more than AIDS and cancer. It's all around us and we see it everyday. No one is safe, really. It can happen to your best friend, your brother, your sister, your primo, prima and abuelita . . . . and it can even happen to YOU. I'm of course talking about pandemic of losing yourself completely when in a relationship that's spreading like a proverbial wildfire.

No doctor of medicine or expert of psychological pseudo-sciences can explain it. How does a grown man, with a fully-functioning pair of testicles instantly lose them when he meets a girl? Where do they go!? Jesus Christ . . . you'd have a better chance of finding Amelia Earhart and Jimmy Hoffa on the same day than you would your friend's manhood.

And before the ugly finger of misogyny gets pointed in this direction, it must be said that it goes both ways. All too often smart, fun-loving, and ambitious women are mercilessly molded into boring, reclusive, non-text-message-answering dopplegangers of their former selves.

Is it really worth it to lose yourself? The only thing we are born with, that is ours eternally and unquestionably is our-motherfucking-selves. Why would anyone willingly give that away? Perhaps its a combination of things . . . like loneliness, low self esteem, and the temptation of the all powerful FUCK--dangled over their heads by a string like a carrot leading a donkey.

Whatever the case may be, it saddens me greatly. Every time I witness a case of grand theft autonomy, a little piece of me dies inside. Each and every person can give their friends, loved ones, strangers, and lovers SO MUCH if they could simply be themselves.

I leave you all with lyrics from the ever-wise REO Speedwagon and their 1987 hit That Ain't Love. It's an inspirational "fuck you! i'm better off without you" ballad in the tradition of I Will Survive. Here goes:

You tell me what you think Im feelin', you know why I do what I do
Why should you listen to a word I'm sayin', when it's already so clear to you
You tell me 'bout my bad intentions, you doubt the very things I hold true
I can no longer live with your misconceptions, baby all I can say to you, is

That ain't love, I believe you've got the wrong emotion
That ain't love, at least it doesn't feel like love to me
As long as I say what you wanna hear
Do what you wanna do, be who you want me to be
You think that's love, well baby that ain't love to me