bunnyspatial.com

Back in 1989 I was sorta going to Dunwoody High School. I say sorta, because for the last month or so I was there I would attend first period and then grab a book from the library and spend the rest of the day in the woods behind school reading and smoking until the final period, which was Music Appreciation with Mr. Hinton. It was a class where we would get to bring in our own music, play it, and then have the class discuss the qualities of the song. I don’t think there was one time that I didn’t bring in my TMBG Flood cassette. To this very day I still try to force the band on anyone who will tolerate my presence for more than two minutes - not the largest demographic in the world.

Last night I got to see them live for the second time in their two decade spanning career, as it fit perfectly with my plan to only go outside once every decade. They played the Variety Playhouse in Little Five Points, a section of Atlanta easily found by following the distinctive scent of hippies and goths co-mingling. I call it Patchouli and Despair. Smells like a Neil Gaiman novel down there.

The show opened with a guy playing the ukelele who seemed to have a nautical fetish. Ukelele songs are much like pancakes, which never fail to seem like a good idea at the time but after the third or fourth one you start to feel like you wanna throw up a little. Michael Leviton actually held his own pretty well all things considered. It takes guts to go out on stage with what amounts to a midget guitar. Guts, or Tiny Tim’s borderline psychosis.

During the intermission between his set and THMB’s set I took some time to observe the crowd. A They Might Be Giants audience is one of the most diverse ones you are bound to find anywhere. Guys in business suits mingling with paunchy geeks, Suicide Girl hopefuls mingling with paunchy geeks, and I, Lord of the Paunchy Geeks. I will be their king one day.

(more…)

I should just title all my posts “Those whacky Japanese.” Not content with slowly infiltrating our culture with their own brand of disgustingly adorable but intensely compelling cuteness, one Japanese company has decided to speed up the process. By combining the two great tastes that taste great together: plushies and firearms.

Yes my friends, Sunamiya has singlehandedly advanced warfare thousands of years into the future with the invention of the Teddy Bear gun. Apparently in Japan they are not satisfied throwing rice or birdseed at weddings. After what I imagine were some truly tragic experiments involving alternative tossing items (used schoolgirl panties, those little daggers Naruto characters throw about, and possibly Zelda creator Shigeru Miyamoto), the Japanese have latched onto the trend of throwing teddy bears at newlyweds in order to simulate and age old custom from ancient Nihon where newly married couples were ritualistically mauled by bears.

Yes, I just made that up.

The gun is basically the plushie equivalent of a party popper, launching a tiny bear in a graceful arc through the air in a way that the slightly less expensive arm that most humans come with could easily recreate. The only difference is you can hold the gun sideways, gangsta style.

I plan on getting a truckload of these as soon as they come out, so you all better watch yourselves. As Goldilocks learned in a most painful fashion, you don’t want someone to pop a bear in yo ass.

As you all are completely unaware, my birthday was yesterday, Monday May 1st. Got myself They Might Be Giants tickets, a nice computer chair, Naruto for the Gamecube (so I can trounce my uppity nephew at it), and the first seasons of The Batman, Justice League, and Teen Titans. DC wins cartoons, Marvel wins comics. As it should be.

Special thanks goes out to the hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants who marched yesterday to celebrate my birth. I owe you guys taquitos!

You know, Youtube is there for a reason. Figured I would slap this slipshod effort up on there to make viewing easy and fun!

Gnome girls. Gotta love gnome girls.

Yeah, so I am a little late in posting this. As many of you already know, the Nintendo Revolution has gotten an official name. Wii, pronounced ‘we’. Nintendo states that this symbolizes everyone playing together. It’s not about you or me. It’s all about Wii.

I will refrain from making crude penis jokes or talking about urine…well, other than the post header. Those were driven into the ground yesterday within minutes of the announcement, and the pile of badly beaten horse corpses is beginning to stink. What I will say, however, is good job Nintendo. Whether you think the name is stupid or not, they certainly got people talking, didn’t they? Somewhere a PR department is partying today - after all, there is no such thing as bad publicity. Good or bad, everyone is talking. You go Nintendo PR people! In your honor, I found this video on Youtube! Just pretend you’re all Robin.

The Japanese really like watching girls beat the crap out of other girls. Ever since the fighting/wrestling genre first surfaced the friend people of Nihon have been churning out mediocre doses of girl-on-girl fighting action. For extra added creepiness, almost every one contains at least one schoolgirl (sometimes an all schoolgirl cast!) as well as gratuitous panty shots. Just another reason to move to Japan, I suppose. If EA tried to make a game about underage girls flashing their privates and kicking each other in the crotch they’d be sued so hard they’d have to cut open their lawyers (with lightsabers?) and crawl inside their steaming guts to survive. In Japan, they’d get taken out for karaoke.

Awhile back Konami released Rumble Roses for the Playstation 2. The original game featured a surprisingly enjoyable wrestling engine, entertainingly corny story modes for each of the wrestlers and a good/evil character system, mainly in place so that they could cram a naughty schoolgirl and cheerleader into one character, creating what amounts to a shameful fantasy extinction level event. On top of that there were humiliation moves, during which your half-naked avatar realizes that a thong was probably not a good choice for the wrestling ring, something that Hulk Hogan thankfully discovered decades ago. Oh, and mud wrestling. You could estimate a good 80 hours of game play from the title, with 30 of that being masturbating and another 10 awkwardly touching your bloody and painfully chafed manhood.

Thus having gone over the first game, I can only guess that for Rumble Roses XX they wanted to balance the self-love/frustration ratio. Perhaps they got complaints. Stories about grievous penis injuries, with polaroids attached. Either way, mission accomplished.
(more…)

I think it was around the time that Everquest Online Adventures came out that EB stopped returning opened games. Up until then you could return a game within seven days as long as it was in good condition. I believe it was the Coalition of Retarded Application Programmers (C.R.A.P.) who got them to change this policy once they realized that 90% of their unplayable trash was being returned to the store while the other 10% never made it past the players’ garbage disposals. Since then, the only way to exchange an opened game for something else was if the store was out of the particular title, or by trading the game in, which involves the game store employees returning half your cash and then making up the difference by peeing on you.

Enter my new hero, Dratz from Confessions of an IT Hitman:

The clerk seemed a little confused so I asked for the manager. Several minutes later, the manager came out and explained the policy to me.

I informed him I was not trying to illegally copy games and that I have a long (several years) track record buying games from them and had never returned a game before this. He smiled and restated the policy. He said they could take it in as a trade in. For half of what I paid for it the day before.

He said since the game had been opened, he had no options. He could only issue a refund for unopened games.

I finally said fine, and they reached up on the shelf and gave me a sealed copy of that stupid game.

We’ve all been here, but few have gone here:

I then walked back up to the counter where the manger was smiling and whispering with the unhelpful clerk.

I got their attention and showed them what was in my hands.

“Hi, I have my receipt and an unopened game. I would like a refund.”

They stopped smiling.

As many a site before me has mention, this took magnificent and massive balls. If only he had a camera on hand to take a picture of their faces, or his testicles, for that matter. We could all print it out and put up little shrines all over the country.

Read his full account here!

Via The Consumerist

From the fine folks over at Geek-Week.Net, the geek alternative to civil war re-enactment.

Behold, the Secret Wars Re-enactment in all of its glory!

I so want to do this, if only to see how many of us can get beaten to death in Piedmont Park. Oooo, we could re-enact the Beast Wars! Get your geek on!

Via Screenhead

Pardon the multiple random posts. Wordpress 2.0 is being a complete bitch.

Way back in my late teens, I knew this girl who used the name Pandora when she played live action Vampire: The Masquerade. This post has nothing to do with her other than the fact that every time I hear the term ‘Pandora’s Box’ I giggle like a schoolgirl. A 6′6″ bearded schoolgirl. HAWT.

This post is actually about the amazing free music website, Pandora, that helps you find new artists based on your current musical preferences. Basically you go to the site, enter in the name of an artist or a song, and it creates a radio station for you that plays music with similar qualities. For instance, enter in Stone Temple Pilots and you might get songs by Rush or Saliva. You can then tailor your preferences further by ranking the songs that play. It’s like playing the hotter/colder game with music.

Pandora is a product of the Music Genome Project, in which a group of musicians and music-loving technologists set out to analyze music to an amazing degree, breaking them down into different tonalities, instrument groups, moods, etc. Since 2000 they have listened to songs from over 10,000 artists, which really makes me feel bad about that one year where I listened to the Spin Doctors’ Two Princes close to a hundred times a day.

Ever mention a band to a friend and have them suggest another band that’s a lot like them? That is what Pandora is. A friend who helps you discover new music, and doesn’t try to mount your girlfriend. What more can a guy ask for?

Oh, and check the left nav! It displays my favorite songs on the site as well as links to stations I have created on my account. Nifty!

In the spirit of Easter, the holiday that celebrates Jesus coming back to life, pushing the rock away from his cave, seeing his shadow and therefor heralding in 6 more weeks of winter, I present you with the Top Five Bunny-Themed Video Games of All Time. I was going to do the top five jesus related video games of all time, but once you get past Bible Adventures on the NES (flying baby Moses!) it all goes downhill, so I decided to go with a much more recognizeable and less flayed alive in the street Easter icon, the bunny. Perhaps I am a bit biased. Who knows.

5. Space Bunnies Must Die, 1998 PC

Horrible. So very bad. I had to play it. It combined T&A with deranged, skinless bunny monsters. It was as if the developers of the game sat by my bedside and recorded my dreams. A platformer/shooter hybrid, I mainly remember Space Bunnies because they were freaking EVERYWHERE at E3 in 1998. I am still pulling promotional materials from the game out of various boxes, drawers, and orifices almost a decade since the show.

4. Jazz Jackrabbit, 1994 PC

Ah, the good old days of shareware. Before Epic got all Unreal on us, they developed neat little 2D platforming games that did their very best to completely destroy my productivity in my early 20’s. Jazz Jackrabbit was just such a game. The titular hero was a green space rabbit…or I assume he was a space rabbit. I mean hell, he was green. He also had guns, which he used to rescue the princess and defeat his nemesis, Devan the turtle. Think of it as The Tortoise and the Hare Part 2: Buns with Guns. The lazy can defeat the persistent as long as they have superior firepower. Take that Aesop, you pussy.

3. Sonic Advance 2, 2003 GBA

The second game in the Sonic the Hedgehog GBA saga introduced a new character named Cream, who I am sure in some way inspired the mascot of this website. That alone earns her kudos (mmm, chocolate covered granola bars). The game was pretty much standard Sonic fare, but Cream and her little chao friend Cheese made all the difference, adding just the right touch of Bunny Goodness, while managing to teeter just on the good side of disgusting cuteness.

2. Tiny Toon Adventures, 1991 NES

Probably the second best cartoon to ever come out of Warner Brothers (Animaniacs for the Win!), Tiny Toons is still going strong today in the video game world despite being off the air for a decade or so now. This first foray on the NES featured Buster and Babs Bunny as well as a host of non-bunny friends who really don’t matter here. Buster is of course famous for the best line ever used on a girl’s father while picking her up on a date, “I bet you displace a lot of water when submerged.” A relatively standard platforming title mixed up a bit by individual characters having unique skills to help them through levels, the best thing about this game was the never-ending theme song loop. That sort of thing sticks in your head something fierce. To this day I am still playing Tiny Toon Adventures every time I close my eyes, which explains a great deal.

And the number one Bunny Video Game is…

1. Jumping Flash, 1996 Playstation 1

Combining the two best things in the world, bunnies and robots, Jumping Flash mixed vomit-inducing 3D platforming with first-person shooter game play, cementing in my head the fact that the only thing that could improve a cute, fluffy rabbit, aside from perhaps a nice white wine sauce, was surface to air missiles. Robbit, our mechanical lapin protagonist, is a hero for the ages who went on to star in maybe one other game that no one really played. Still, BUNNY ROBOT!

Feel free to add your own to the list! Perhaps you could create a collage of screenshots, or a hand puppet. Learning is fun!

Happy Easter!