I’ve decided to have a weekly post called Lyrics Monday to put up some of my favorite lyrics to songs. The songs I post will rarely be metal as lyrics are generally something I am not really into when it comes to metal, but who knows you may see some pop up from time to time.

Although metal is probably my #1 most listened to genre and easily without a doubt the #1 genre I play on guitar, I actually listen to a lot of other stuff. Punk, Blues, Folk and some other weird stuff. Easily my favorite ‘Punk’ band and probably one of my favorite bands -- period -- is Propagandhi. Ever since I first listened to them 12 years ago or so when I was in High School they just spoke to me. I don’t always agree with what they have to say but that’s not the point. They really make me think and they have come a LONG way in the last 10 years or so. Musically and lyrically they are a much more mature band. They used to be in your face with songs like ‘Meat is Murder’ and ‘Stick the Fucking Flag Up Your Goddamn Ass’. Nowadays they are much more poetic, and vague with their lyrics. They still have a lot to say about Vegetarianism, the Government, Corporations, War, etc but get their point across so much more gracefully now.

On their newest album, Supporting Caste they have done what was once unimaginable for them and written a song that is extremely personal and is about love and loss. Without further ado here are the lyrics to ‘Without Love’ by Propagandhi:

All in nature ends in tragedy and I was the first to finally fade away from my grandfather’s memories. How long ’til the day my memories of him finally fade away? Dissolving into gray. Is breathing just the ticking of an unwinding clock? Just counting down the time it takes for you to comprehend the sheer magnitude of every single precious breath you’ve ever wasted? I did everything I could. I bargained with the universe to take my life instead of hers. But no amount of money, drugs or tears could keep her here. What purpose did her suffering serve? Is breathing just the ticking of an unwinding clock? Just counting down the time it takes for you to comprehend the sheer magnitude of every single precious breath you’ve ever wasted? So much misery. So much indifference to so much suffering that we can become tempted by appeals to hatred. But this world ain’t nothing more than what we make of it. Revenge ain’t no solution to the inevitable pain that every single one of us must face in losing the kindred spirits in our lives. Lives so brief, so disappointing, so confusing. As Cronie slipped away I held her in my arms, reduced to “Please don’t leave me. What will I do?” But this cosmic sadness is just here to remind you that without Love, breathing is just the ticking of…

If you want to listen to the song, check it out here:

The new Assassin’s Creed installment is out, Brotherhood. I’m not going to say it’s the best game I have ever played but if you are a fan of the Assassin’s Creed franchise then this game will do you no wrong.

The game is 99% set in Rome (with a short beginning in Monteriggioni). As always this game is fairly accurate historically which is one of the most enthralling aspects. You can scale your way up the Coliseum, various Duomos and landmarks in Rome, just as they were in the late 1400′s and early 1500′s. The creators of these games have done their homework, and although the overall plotline is completely fictional, it is based on real history, real people and real events. For example at the very start of the game, Ezio’s hometown of Monteriggioni is attacked by Cesare Borgia’s army which actually happened in real life in 1499. Throughout the game you are engaged in a struggle with the Borgia army and the Pope,  being closely allied with Niccolo Machiavelli. All real people and based on real events.

Personally this is my favorite part of the game. In Assassin’s Creed 2 you could freely run around Florence. Having been to Florence it was pretty cool to see things I recognized, but how they would have been in the late 1400′s.  The overall layout of the city was dead on. The game is almost educational in a sense. At each landmark you can press a button and see a quick history lesson on the landmark, who it was built by, etc.

The game itself gets a little repetitive and is not challenging at all. I passed the game fairly quickly and may have died once or twice by accidentally falling off a building. There are a lot of extras in the game that you can try to complete, or you can also ignore them with no consequence. I’m not a gamer who has to pass the game 100%. As long as I get to the end I’m good. This made the game pretty short.

The sword fighting is pretty wicked, but becomes repetitive and ridiculously easy once you get the hang of it. Assassin’s Creed 2 definitely did a better job of adding various combination moves and skills as you get further through the game. Since AC Brotherhood is just a continuation of AC2, you start out with most of those skills and there is very little improvement from there. There is a new execution feature where you can get on a pretty good roll executing guy after guy, but even that gets old pretty quickly. After a while you are just going through the motions and holding one button and mashing the other.

The addition of banks, owning shops, renovating landmarks and riding horses within the city are all good enhancements to the game but they need to make some improvements to the real meat and potatoes of the game, which in my opinion is the fighting and the stealth aspects.

If you haven’t spent your money on an Assassin’s Creed game yet but are thinking you want to give it a try, get AC2. You won’t miss anything major from AC1 and you will enjoy yourself more than you would with Brotherhood.

Danielle and I have a new favorite show, Departures on OLN. Moving away from Drama TV shows, this is a documentary-style TV series about 3 guys (one being the camera man) who leave their jobs, homes and lives to travel for a year. Sometimes they go to popular destinations, like Thailand, but they always go off the beaten path and end up having the most amazing experiences. After one season, they do it again two more times for a total of almost 3 full years on the road.

For anyone with an interest in traveling, I would highly recommend this show. Best reality show ever, hands down.

I haven’t posted in a while so I thought I would talk about my new favorite show, Breaking Bad. This show is so intense you will be squirming the whole time you are watching it.

If you haven’t heard of Breaking Bad, it is about a High School Chemistry teacher named Walt who gets diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer. Walt realizes that once he reaches his inevitable demise, he will leave nothing but debt for his family, so he decides to do something drastic to earn some quick cash. He partners up with a former student and begins cooking crystal meth. Being a chemistry expert, he soon discovers that he is capable of making some of the best meth around. Selling it, on the other hand, poses some problems.

What I love most about this show is watching Walt’s slow transformation from an innocent guy just trying to support his family, into a full fledged criminal who fabricates lie after lie to cover up his secret. At moments you love him and at other times you can’t help but despise who he has become. Either way, you cannot deny the acting ability of Bryan Cranston, who plays Walt. It’s pretty amazing to watch the former dad on Malcolm In the Middle play a character like this.

I highly recommend this show, so check it out.

Me and a few of my friends usually get together every few months and have a ‘Shitty Movie Night’ (SMN). This is when we purposely rent the crappiest movie we can find (usually horror) and just make jokes the entire time we watch it.

The last few SMNs have been okay, but I was starting to get worried that we had seen all the best shitty movies out there.

Then we got our hands on Ice Spiders. This movie is pretty much everything I look for in a shitty horror movie. You have genetically mutated/engineered animals on a killing rampage, then you have terrible computer graphics, topped with just horrific acting. Those are basically the three keys to a good shitty horror movie.

On top of these it also has some other great additional components. It always adds to the movie when the animal has a “vision”, which is when the director decides to show a camera angle which is supposed to appear as if it’s the point of view of the animal. In this case, spider vision. I’ve seen Sasquatch-vision (aka squatch-vision), sabretooth-vision (aka sabre-vision) and a multitude of other great visions.

The only really disappointing part was that the scene on the cover of the DVD does not exist, and the spiders are only a fraction of that size. Basically during the entire movie I was expecting for the ‘king’ spider to pop out and just wreak havoc on the place, but unfortunately that never happened.

If you are looking for a good movie for your shitty movie night, I highly recommend Ice Spiders.

P.S. Honorable mention goes to the other movie we watched, “Cry Wolf” which surprisingly had Jon Bon Jovi in a major role throughout the movie.