Dr. Squatch is damn good soap

This is not an advertisement, but it’s going to read like one. I will readily admit, I totally fell for the Dr. Squatch video ad years back fronted by comedian James Schrader as it was hilarious and subsequently started up a small soap subscription. I want to say a couple things because I think it’s an EXPENSIVE but excellent product.

First, I don’t think about soap, well not until now. I grew up with Irish Spring, Ivory and Yardley’s of London soap as a kid as an adult I would just get those bottles of ‘soap’ from a pump and never thought about it.

Of course, special soaps were for womenfolks! When you see the little soap places at the mall or at county fairs or farmers markets, it’s ALWAYS marketed to the women. Therefore, I never thought about this type of soap as a guy except as gifts for gals and me mum –and it all smells super girly anyway. The Squatch stuff is marketed specifically, and humorously, towards men. Never having thought about it before, I figured, what the heck. This turned out to be a good marketing ploy to fall for, the shit is GOOD and I did give a few bars to my mom even though they are MANLY SOAPS.

The Dr. Squatch stuff showed up and smelled great. I used it for a week or so and while still thinking about soap, called it already as the best bar soap I’ve ever used. Skin doesn’t feel all dry (I never noticed before that it was, but it was) after or later in the day. It has great lather, and a good variety of (manesque) smells. All of the bars were great, but the Pine Tar made everything in the shower black for a bit, so I wasn’t the biggest fan of that one. Some of the bars last longer than others, but generally they last awhile. It sorta depends who else is using your shower. My kids get in there and I think they lather up with the shit for a LONG period of time because that’s what this soap wants you to do: lather the shit out of yourself, which, thinking about soap for probably the first time in my existence, is likely the mark of good soap.

That said, it’s 6$ PER BAR. This is expensive. Realistically I’d like to be paying about 3$ per bar of soap, but I really cannot fault the quality of this stuff. Try it– and you probably don’t ever need to think about soap again.

Lastly, this is a gaming blog so for me to take the effort, as fucking lazy as I am, to post about soap, I have to say I REALLY like the soap and when I use of my favorite scents down to a nub and it falls to the floor of the shower, sometimes, I feel sad. Otherwise, I pretty much will never think about soap again other than which scent to grab next.

Virtua Fighter 5 turned 10 last month

Wow. 10 years. I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface yet with this fighter and I have played it a lot. I still ALWAYS have my Xbox 360 connected to a TV in the house for this game alone (and a few others). Granted, right when this came out I had my second kid crawling around, so there hasn’t been much time for serious fighting game play or practice.

I first played Virtua Fighter 2 in the arcade at the University of Florida (and later at the arcade in Madison, WI) and waited EAGERLY for it to come out on consoles. I could never get anyone to really play it with me a ton, and in the later 90’s we had TOBAL 2 which eclipsed everything. While I followed the series, I didn’t get into it again until VF4, which is amazing. The Kumite mode in that game really pushed it over the edge, where you go to different arcades and compete in different tournaments and the AI of the players follows the styles of various real people!

To put it in the most basic terms: VF5 is the greatest fighting game ever made.

  • It’s very easy for new people to pick up (it only has three buttons!!!) and at the same time it is by far the deepest fighter I’ve ever played. Please see this essay on closed and open stances if you disagree.
  • It’s not combo heavy. Like King of Fighters / Samurai Shodown, it’s got combos, but they are difficult to pull off and don’t dominate play.
  • Every character is like a new world of gameplay. The difference in playing even Brad Burns vs Jacky, which in many other games would be almost palette swaps, is like the depth of the ocean. Let alone exceedingly different characters like Aoi and Wolf.
  • It’s not a defensive, footsy game. Tekken and Street Fighter are footsy games. They are good games, but the footsy is really an annoying part of the game to me, especially in Tekken where you can full screen combo off a low kick.
  • There are no tiers. Certainly there are character tiers at high level play, but you, my friend, will never notice them. If you get good with a character, you will be able to fight vs every other character. The last tournament I watched had a Jeffry (low tier) vs Akira (highest tier) IN THE FINAL.
  • It has not been eclipsed by any other 3D fighting game. DOA and Tekken, while of course more popular at this time, are SHADOWS compared to Sega’s masterpiece. I like DOA 5 and 6, I think they are way more fun than Tekken, but I did the TASTE TEST with my kids and some neighbor kids and VF won out 100%. The only game that came close, for me (and notable others) was, of course, Tobal 2.
  • It’s fast and it’s high damage. Rounds can last awhile or be over quick. This isn’t due to people being caught in endless combos like the Anime fighters, but due to general high damage of all the characters. Again, like King of Fighters and Samurai Shodown.
  • Creative play. The core thing about Tobal and VF compared to a lot of fighters is their ability for players to play a single character in many different ways. Watch a mirror match up in VF and you won’t see the same play-styles or even the same moves. It’s insane and very different from a lot of the 2D fighters where you have your bread and butter comboes that you see constantly (and supermoves)
  • NO meters, no super moves. Only one character has a meter-equivalent and that’s Shun, who gets drunk. All a character’s moves are available to use at all times otherwise. VF proves you don’t need that shit (though it is fun in 2d fighters) to have the best fighting game ever.
  • Counter Picking – this is a big thing in King of Fighters and Street Fighter. Ryu beats Ken, Ken beats down everyone else. This is also a big part of Tekken. This has no part in VF, again, because VF effectively has no tiers.
  • It has only three buttons

People still play, there are tournaments going on even now. This is from just the other day.

Watch in high level play in VF that the players keep their characters right near each other at all times. Look at ANY other fighting game and there’s a lot of long/medium play and when characters get close in it usually means someone is instantly full screen comboe’d. This is because the players are testing their Yomi vs what the other players will do with the whole guard, attack, throw rock paper scissors.

Platforms. VF5 has not been officially ported to the PS4 or XBONE. You can play it on PS Now (yuck) or buy it on the XBONE as a backwards compatible game. I believe most competitive play is on the PS3 still. So like Tobal 2 (the subject of another post) this is a game you have to work at getting to play.

So get your PS3, Xbox 360 or Yakuza on the PS4 and play some Virtua Fighter!

Great article by Virtua Kazama

Casmir Pulaski

With the juxtaposition of the current frenzy of historical revisionism, iconoclasm, iconoclast trolling and let’s not forget base traitors who deface statues of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, along with July 4th, the date we chose to celebrate throwing off the yoke of Feudalism (the final signatures weren’t there until October though), I feel compelled to do a bit on a lesser known, but critical figure in American history: Casmir Pulaski.

Casmir Pulaski was a disposed, banished second-son Polish noble who joined the American Revolution and died via GRAPESHOT in the battle of Savannah. This alone would be enough to have statues and revere the guy, but this is overshadowed by some of the other things he accomplished.

First off, he joined anti-Russian confederation in Poland and actively campaigned, mostly defending fortresses and getting his ass kicked, getting captured, and almost court-martial-ed. It was said that the only thing he was interested in was fighting the Russians, and was wholly reckless and didn’t obey orders. Pulaski even went on to join the war with the Ottomans vs the Russians a few years later, which ended poorly for him and he ended up in France in debtor’s prison. He was found by Benjamin Franklin who recommended him to Washington as an asset to the Revolution. He started as a cavalry officer and then a General of the Continental army’s tiny and wholly shitty cavalry–which he attempted to bring up to Polish standards of training and discipline. He’s called the Father of American Cavalry and man, at that time, we needed one.

Under Washington, he performed a successful rearguard action that likely saved Washington and his army from capture and destruction, and possibly saved Washington’s life. Washington was an expert-retreater (hey, don’t knock it, it’s how Fabius defeated Hannibal after all) so this was a critical event.

Later in the war he was leading a cavalry charge that was beaten off, and he was hit by grapeshot, which, like slivers of the true cross, seems to be in quite a few different museums around the South!

Pulaski is one of only eight people who have been granted honorary citizenship. The Freemasons have claimed him and there seems no doubt, despite the lack of paperwork, that Pulaski was a Mason based on the fact that Franklin and Washington were, of course, Masons as well.

Lastly, and I am not sure about all this, is the conjecture that he was actually a woman based on a skeleton that was found that might be his. He didn’t drink and had no interest in women, which is likely explained by something much more common if you catch my drift, than a man pretending to a be a woman or having some odd chromosome condition.

While Pulaski died in Georgia, many statues of him are in the Midwest in Chicago, hopefully people actually look up who he was before tearing them down or realize that coming out of over a thousand years under the grip of iron fisted feudal lords, the framers of the Constitution and the people that fought to get us STARTED on our path to Liberty and Freedom are to be revered, and not held to the modern standards of ethics and conduct, modern ethics that their lives and dedication allowed to evolve. Of course, in DC, the people have already proven that they are fucking imbeciles.

Blood Machines – yep

This is a film of note, not because of story or dialog, but because of visuals, sound and ship design. This has spoilers, which does not matter because it’s the experience of watching what happens rather than what actually happens.

The characters are two guys —some sort of space scavengers (Vascan and Lago), one young, one old, and their ship which is a female AI (Tracy) that that apparently at least one of the guys has sex with. The AI doesn’t always let them do what they want (this doesn’t have a ton of explanation) and there is an admiral or something like that who is on a larger mothership that is giving them their orders.

The ship design is absolutely top drawer.

These scavengers shoot down a space ship that crashes on a planet. They have their ship land on the planet and the young one gets out of the ship to start retrieval and is confronted with some amazonian style women. The old man has a heart problem and is reluctantly saved by the ship’s medical system. The guy on the planet fights the amazons and the women get the drop on him and start some ritual on the destroyed ship that releases a naked woman with a glowing downside cross on her stomach and crotch regions who flies off into space. The scavengers escape the planet after capturing one of the amazons, and they follow the naked woman who flies off into space and heads into a strange warp. This leads to a spaceship grave-yard with some massive space ship/death star thing in the middle of it which the naked lady heads for and goes inside. The scavengers land on the planetoid and the young guy heads inside with the amazonian. He finds a room with the naked lady and the amazonian gets the drop on him in a strange sex scene (the only one in the film and it’s fully clothed the whole time) and kills him. Then a clone of the young guy goes back to the ship and tells the Admiral to come to where they are as soon as possible to capture this entity. This kills the old man member of the crew who has a heart attack after realizing that the young guy is a clone. The clone blows his own head off with a laser weapon. The admiral shows up and the amazonian woman puts on a glowing gas mask and conjures up a PILE of naked women ghosts from ALL the ships in the spaceship graveyard who then attack the admirals ship with pieces of their ships. The admiral’s ship is sucked into the planetoid and the whole mess morphs into, you guessed it, a GIANT NAKED WOMAN. The amazonian goes back to the scavenger’s ship and does something to the old man that died of a heard attack so he wakes up with glowing eyes. The other guy wakes up INSIDE the giant space woman trapped in her flesh. The end.

This film was made for about 100K and while it has issues with plot, dialog, some pacing problems it is undeniably visionary and really one huge horny trip out Flash Gordonesque music video for 50 minutes.

There are a lot of interesting shots and sequences in this film but my favorite one of them is where a ‘sun’ is rising over the ass cheek of the naked ghost girl like the beginning of G-force or any other sci fi film you’ve ever seen. I just laughed outloud at this. 50 minutes, recommended.

Will Gencon’s cancellation open the way for local summer cons?

Gencon just announced it’s cancellation, while at the same time scout camps are firing up and kids will be at camp in a couple weeks across the country- outdoor events in contrast to a major indoor one mostly in closed rooms with recycled air. What Gencon likely doesn’t want is to have a super-spreader event, however unlikely that is during the middle of summer, and have everyone go home and spread it around– a lot like what happens with Con Crud. Again, very unlikely, but I can see why they cancelled it. Indoors, people pressed together, people talking and yelling and getting real close. Sucks, but here we are. Gives me an excuse to finally not go after going since 1994 every…. single… time and instead stay home and game with almost the same friends that I game with at Gencon anyway. I will REALLY miss the auction though… fuck.

That said, a lot has changed in the last couple months and a lot will change in June and July. You have extremes of people who say they will never go to a bar again in 2020 and stay at home until 2021, i.e.:, the bed wetters, and others that are already out at the bars partying and going to underground speakeasy’s and secret restaurants, i.e.: the ‘get it in my body herd immunity folks’. We’ll have to see which extreme ages the best. Most will choose the middle ground, stick to small gatherings, look at the local situation and wait a bit.

What they thought would happen.
What actually happened.

My question is, will the cancellation of Gencon open the way for local cons at the same time to step up and fill the gape? They would have to be set up very quickly and frankly for the group of people most effected by the panic even more than your typical facebook Karen– nerds that are on the computers all day long with the horror of bringing every named death, every celebrity infection, every horrifying hospital and morgue story, every panic porn story about kids dying at age 9 (which was debunked, the woman was actually 94) right at their finger tips at any moment.

I’m hesitant to say yes. I think there will be small cons, maybe a beer stand, some tables at a game store an some stuff in the parking lot. There likely won’t be anything on campuses as they will sadly be closed most of the summer (and many won’t ever reopen anyway as they’ll be out of business), but it’s possible that in some places people set up conventions, especially down south where they are drinking a whole bottle of ‘I don’t give a fuck.’ If they do happen, and people divert this year to these cons, they may just continue to do so?

Would it be the year to bring Gencon back to Lake Geneva? Maybe as an all outdoor event in the summer heat? Maybe have age and health screenings in order to be able to go to any group events? You have to be under 40 and fit– and this isn’t really the demographic unfortunately– but FAR more so than when I went to gencon in the late 80’s/ early 90’s. You can’t age or health stratify any event, from sports to cons or even going to the grocery store. For liability: if you have the event and keep certain people out:litigation!, or if you have the event and someone gets sick: litigation!, all events will likely be cancelled regardless of the progress of the virus itself.

Behind the Green Door – oh boy

This will be a rare post about a pornographic movie. Don’t really watch porn and if I did, well, read on.

Cannonball Run did this to me. There’s a scene where the Asian Team is driving through a boring area, one of them falls asleep and the other (played by none other than Jackie Chan!) throws a video tape into the dashboard VCR (remember, this was 1981 or so, this would be seen as amazing at the time). While it could have just showed scenes from any type of fuck film, it clearly shows the film’s title before getting to the almost nude part. The name of that film: Behind the Green Door.

I’ve constantly made jokes over the years using this film’s title as it’s much more subtle than The Devil in Miss Jones, etc., for a porno, as most people don’t know what it is and then go look it up on their phones to catch the reference. Someone that knows Cannonball Run well will really have a laugh.

While I saw Cannonball Run when I was a little kid, I watched it again years later when I became a big fan of Jackie Chan. At the time, there was really no normal way to see the Green Door, so I forgot about it. I made the joke to someone a few weeks ago and decided then, if I’m going to joke about it, I better actually watch this fucking thing: and it’s a doozy.

The film begins with some guy going into an all-night diner and meeting an older guy. In the first scene you may be asleep already as it shows a woman fixing up coffee and tinkling dishes for a shocking amount of screen time, fixed camera. Then the chef comes out asks about telling ‘the green door’ story and the guys reluctantly say OK. Then it cuts (fucking finally) to a girl driving a car with the top down while showing the opening credits. It looks like it’s raining as she has the windsheild wiper on. While this is likely a staple in all later porn films, the actress looks and is dressed a bit like Francois Hardy rather than in a bikini or something like that. Next there are these guys from the diner, which must be a flashback, talking at a table outside at a hotel about some nonsense with bananas, it makes no sense and after about 2 minutes I skipped over this part. Then it shows the very young and quite pretty Marilyn Chambers (who starred in David Cronenburg’s Rabid a few years later) in a cool hat sitting nearby drinking a beer. This is the lady from the car. She’s listening to the nonsense story of the guys at the table nearby. Then some music is playing. This goes on and on and on with some focusing in and out on the same shot to the girl and to the guy babbling at a table. fucking glacial.

Then it’s night and the woman is dressed up walking down some stairs outside. She gets grabbed by a couple of guys in a brown station wagon and taken away.

Next is some scene in a bourdois and a guy with a handlebar mustache crushes a football until it pops and then he leads the guys from the diner, now dressed up in tuxes and wearing masks into some theatre. The handle bar mustache man laughs after they walk away and sit down in the theater. This MUST have been the MAIN influence for EYES WIDE SHUT, certainly.

Then there are some mimes on a stage. That’s right, mimes. This is 10 minutes into the film. I’m going to skip to the important parts as there aren’t very many at this point.

The mime goes on for awhile and then they bring out the girl they stole from in front of the hotel, who comes out if, you guessed it, the GREEN DOOR. A bunch of other women strip her down and rub her… then the magic happens. A black guy comes out on stage wearing only some sort of white cotton chaps with a shell necklace and his face is painted up. The music switches to African drums and the guy prances around showing off his half mast-wang. Then there’s a sex scene which consists mostly of close up shots of the actors faces with a few shots from behind where you can mostly see the guys ass in those strange white cotton chaps. This goes on and on and then just stops.

Then they take the lady and put her on a harness swing thing and she jacks off a couple guys, blows another one, and takes a cock from another, all while on some odd swings. This, amazingly, gets the audience all horny (instead of falling asleep…) and they start having an orgy. This is where the film could have gotten mildly interesting, but one of the guys makes the mistake of shooting his load and, I shit you not, the film devolves into what can only be described as a psychedelic sequence constantly showing this one cum shot in different colors with different film effects with funky music playing for a FULL SIX MINUTES. Think about that for a bit– SIX FULL MINUTES. Even stoned off of your ass you would still get up the energy to fast forward this on your VCR– probably all the way to the end or even just rewind to the beginning and give up.

After this sequence, one of the guys from outside the hotel runs up and escapes with the girl, and then they have sex. The end.

I now have suffered through (most) of this and can, with a perfectly clear conscious, make jokes and references to the movie forever anon. Thanks a lot Cannonball Run for queuing me in on this absolute porno masterpiece.