Happy Shanksgiving!

Hope all guys had a great Thanksgiving and plan on having a good Christmas too.  Not a lot has happened since my last post that I haven't really talked about already but I figured I was a bit overdue for an update.

As far as my comedy schedule goes, I don't really have much of one anymore.  I didn't manage to make the line-up for the Best of the Midwest contest in Bowling Green back in October as most of the comics were actually punctual for once.  And I just found out last night that I didn't make the cut for Stand Up Toledo 2013.  I was in the running but there were so many possible candidates that they just did a random drawing for the 10th spot.  On one hand, I'm a bit bummed as this would've been my biggest show to date as last year drew like 400 people.  I'm not even sure I've performed in front of 100 at any one time.  But I start school the week before, so that's a lot less pressure to add on.  In fact, I have a 10 minute spot this Wednesday for Wise Ass Wednesdays at Connxtions and unless I get a gig in the weeks before Christmas or the first couple weeks in January, this may be the last stand-up I do until April.

However, I did manage to see both Tom Green and Mick Foley do stand-up in November, so that was pretty swell.  I'll be honest, from a stand-up point-of-view, I wouldn't call either show "great".  But considering both of these guys were big during my formative teenage years and kinda shaped who I'd become, it was still great to see.

I went to the last Saturday night show for Tom Green, which would be his last one of the weekend, so that kinda ended up being his "Screw it, I'll get drunk and try out some new material" show.  Most of the people working the club or who had seen him previously said this was his worst show of the weekend, but it was still solid...save for the annoying drunk people.  Even though Tom was getting tipsy himself, you could tell he was annoyed by some of the people and had trouble getting the show back on track.  However, the real fun came after the show as Tom Green stuck around and talked to everybody.  And when I say everybody, I mean literally everyone there that wanted to talk to him and get something signed could.  In fact, when I got to talk to him (and got him to sign my copy of Freddy Got Fingered), I asked him what his method of dealing with annoying drunk people was.  It's a secret tactic and I promised I wouldn't tell so I won't say it here, but I plan on trying it out sometime.  Even after most of the people left, there were about 30 people ended up crammed in the back bar/kitchen of the club and Tom still hung out and talked to people.  I didn't end up going home until about 2 am and there were still plenty of people hanging out, drinking and such.  I bet people wonder if Tom Green is as "weird" in real life as he portrayed himself back in the day but he's super mellow and cool to hang out with.  After the show, he wasn't really doing any "bits", he was just hanging out talking to everyone.  I think he genuinely likes to be around people and see how different every single person is from one another, which is a great quality to have.  I wish I could feel comfortable enough with myself to just be in a group of people and get to know every single one of them.  So yeah, it was a good night.

I could say the same for seeing Mick Foley as well.  Even though he only had one show in Toledo, Foley also felt the need to test out some new material, so it may not have been as solid as other shows.  For the most part it was just an audience Q&A with Foley telling funny stories (nothing really "NEWZworthy" for any of you smart marks reading this, unless you consider "Jimmy Snuka REALLY liked coke in the '80s" to be news) and, much like the Tom Green show a few days before, was derailed near the end by a loud annoying drunk and Foley had a little trouble keeping the show on track.  But Foley had a signing after the show where you could buy one or bring anything you wanted (I brought my copy of "Have A Nice Day") for free.  My friends and I ended up near the line and even though it moved faster than I thought, Foley definitely took time out to make sure to talk to every single person.  When I told him about me being an aspiring stand-up, we talked about how comedy really is a "labor of love".  You have to want to do it because you enjoy doing it, not because you'll get rich and famous from it, because chances are you won't be.  There are so many parallels between stand-up and wrestling, where whether you're in front of 50 or 50,000 people, a good reaction still makes you feel awesome.  Likewise, if you bomb you're still going to feel like a failure, even if it's a sell-out crowd.  Even though we only talked for a few minutes, it's still shows a lot about his character that he's willing to take the time out instead of just signing something and moving along to the next thing.

Other than that, I haven't done a whole lot else.  Honestly, I've spent most of my time playing Hotline Miami.  I was lucky to have won a copy from Destructoid but it's definitely worth paying $10, in my opinion.  In fact, I've been wanting to buy gift copies for my friends, yet have only done so for one, who decided out of the blue to gift me Half-Life 2 and Portal 2 for no reason at all.  Anyways, if you don't know, Hotline Miami is an indie game that has come out recently to much critical acclaim.  The best way to describe it would be if the movie Drive and the Rockstar game Manhunt had a retro-fied baby with some elements of Super Meat Boy.  You basically have to go in a building and clear out mobsters as quickly, efficiently and, most of all, messily as possible.  If you get hit, you'll die, so you need to plan your route, but you also need to be quick.  And quiet, because if you use a gun, the rest of the enemies will attack you, but you can also use that to your advantage as well.  I'm not a fan of games that make you die repeatedly, nor am I all that good at stealth games, or most games from a top-down perspective for that matter, but Hotline Miami combines it all in one package and everything works.  It just wouldn't be as fun if you changed even one of the mechanics.    The first few tries, you'll die a lot and may get frustrated.  But when you figure things out and finish a level, you feel like you just took part in your own movie fight scene.  You'll shoot dudes through windows, use human shields, throw knives across rooms, and you'll find yourself doing it all in one fluid motion before long.  Not to mention, the art style and music are retro-styled and top notch.  Of course, I'm a sucker for '80s new wave music and this game is chock-full of it but even speaking objectively, if anything works better than the game itself, it's the general aesthetic.  Hotline Miami isn't perfect, people are still reporting major bugs even after the game being patched, even though I've never experienced anything beyond slowdown and minor glitches.  But it's definitely worth playing.  And if you're one of my friends, don't be surprised to find it gifted to you someday.

If you've been keeping track, Steam just had one of their crazy ass sales a week or so ago.  Luckily for me, there wasn't a whole lot I wanted, so I bought the aforementioned gift copy of Hotline Miami for my buddy for half-off and Mark Of The Ninja half-off for myself.  I can't really talk about Mark Of The Ninja yet as my computer isn't quite good enough to play it.  I keep having problems where the game doesn't want to recognize my keyboard and mouse all the time.  I've tried to play other games and have installed The Binding of Isaac to start on something new but am having the same problems.  I'm pretty sure I need to upgrade my processor but I can't do that until I'm done with school and am working again so that'll be a while.

That's about it.  I wish I had more to update on.  I'm mostly just killing time until school starts and then I'll focus on that and go from there.  If I don't update this anytime soon, have a happy Christmas, New Year's, Valentine's Day, Easter, Arbor Day and so on.

Selected Playlist courtesy of Pandora
Converge - Black Cloud
Mastodon - Island
Converge - Hanging Moon
Mastodon - Where Strides The Behemoth
Ed Gein - Small Towns, Small Minds
Converge - In Her Blood
Acid Bath - Finger Paintings of the Insane
Electric Wizard - Patterns of Evil
Crystal Castles - Empathy
Stegosaurus Rex - Nowhere To Run
Cut Copy - Future