Review: Fallen Footwear's Chief Skate Shoe

You would think that as any person of note: a basketball player, lacrosse goalie, snowboarder, BMX vert champion, skateboarder, that your signature shoe would be a thing of magnificence. The construction would be most paramount, assembled by a fleet of angels, sewn together with thread made from Minotaur fur, with needles carved from unicorn horns. The design would be meticulous, as if wearing them akin to clouds dancing around your feet, you never feel the earth because you are merely passing by. If you buy a pair of Jordan’s, they are well built and function great. They will not make you an actual Michael Jordan (much to the chagrin to un-athletic, score monster, vertically challenged twenty year-olds), but you will at least be able to wear them in a normal every day setting. Jamie Thomas, a supposedly well known skateboarder, and his shoe company Fallen Footwear, have riled me up to write a review of his signature shoe: The Chief. This shoe is the closest approximation to actually wearing a shoebox instead of the skate shoe that one could possibly get away with. On the list of features this shoe portends:

Jamie Thomas signature model. One would assume this means the man wears this shoe to do Xtreme events in, right? This seems to be a fabrication of facts, seeing as this shoe is such garbage in just average normal everyday wear and tear that I could not imagine trying to compete in any event, save beating someone with the shoe itself, to justify it’s crapiness.

Genuine heavy-duty suede, synthetic nubuck, and/or canvas upper. This statement reads more like it should start with a “Maybe has”. The and/or kind of gives the sentence a “feeble shrug” kind of vibe.

Asymmetric stabilizer for medial upper support. Padded tongue and collar for added comfort and support. Seeing as most purveyors of skate shoes target teenage boys and young adults I feel like this bullet point is more a jumble of podiatrist words to accentuate the fact that NONE of those things are true, except for the padded tongue and collar which is absurdly padded, and is actually the only good part about the shoes. Of course you’ll achieve stabilization if your foot is being crushed by the giant ass tongue of the shoe. It’s like a boot for a cast!

Vulcanized sole construction. Translation: There’s a zig-zaggy pattern on the bottom. Oh, and the logo! Oooooh! Yay industrial presses!

Soft EVA insole with full length latex layer. Yea, it’s in there, it’s soft, I don’t know what the hell an EVA is, but it does bunch up an awful lot! So if you like having that feeling of folded up sock/cardboard underneath your foot all day, you’re in luck! And it’s really annoying and there’s not much you can do about it.

Highly abrasion-resistant rubber outsole for enhanced wear and durability.
Translation most shoes are made with these specs. Also durability my ass: this is after ONE DAY of wear! This is a skate shoe people, this is EVERYDAY wear-n-tear! You’d think it’d be a little better in the durability department.

Gel heel insert for added shock absorption and impact cushioning. I moved this bullet point to last because it is where most of my rage lies. The whole genesis of this review was wrought from this abomination on skate shoe paradise. The apex of this shoe’s shit construction lies deep in the recess, under the heel, with the “gel insert”. First of all, I guess “gel” is a loosely defined word. It’s a lot shorter to write out than “shitty piece of shaved plastic that’s about 2 cm thick and provides actual no real benefit than to be hard and annoying to your heel”. Well, that wouldn’t really be blurb-able would it? It provides zero cushion and shock absorption! On top of this, the gel heel insert doesn’t even cover the heel, mostly just the center mass of your heel, thus adding to that giant pebble in your shoe feel. Now, if this was part of the insole, kind of like a Dr. Scholls, I could forgive it for it’s obtrusive nature and general crappiness. But no, it’s attached with some sort of epoxy, wherein, the damned thing SLIDES out from the place it’s supposed to be, and often will be found on the side of your heel, meanwhile the insole bunches up on itself with the epoxy creating a uncomfortable, warm, sticky foot nightmare! The glue/epoxy gets all over your heel, your socks, anything unfortunate enough to find itself down there. Mind you, this is just from everyday wear. I’m not carving up the skate park, and woe to me if I would even begin to.
Upon removing these scourges from my shoe, I realized a new problem: There’s not really anything underneath the heel! The shoe now feels like it’s set at an angle, with no padding, save the sole, underneath the heel and then progressively more padding along the rest of the shoe. This really can’t be the case?!

This is completely nonfunctional as a skate shoe. Aside from it’s ability to lock your foot and ankle in to position as to not roll it, as I assume must happen to skaters a lot, it is a piece of garbage! Jamie Thomas should recall these shoes, or at least disavow any knowledge of having made this his signature model. It’s akin to buying what you think would be Slash’s Les Paul signature model, and when the package arrives it is a Ukulele with a piece of beef jerky crammed into the sound hole.

Verdict: Only for your most hated enemies birthday present, or to beat back feral animals if cornered in a dark alley.

Shithead Hall of Fame Inductee: Jack Krier

This is a column I’ve been pondering on for quite some time. It doesn’t necessarily need to start off with a bang, but it also needs enough steam to actually facilitate it’s singular presence as a column. Mind you, there are plenty of future shitheads lined up. But I wanted one that I could flex a little, and not seem to being instantly going for the jugular on celebrities, minor comedians, politicians, the usual ilk that spawns these pieces. So with that in mind, I submit the first ever shithead hall of fame inductee: Jack Krier.

Of course, you probably don’t know who this man is so I will enlighten you. He is the publisher of a myriad of small town papers in KS. His major bent is mostly an editorial where he rips off Jeff Foxworthy redneck musings, old timey grandiosity, small town fetish fever dreams, you get the idea. Typically his various papers editorial/opinion pages are packed with up to three of his musings. Aside from the collection essays, are usually two other editorials about the D.C. goings on. I have read letters to the editor wondering why he never writes about local things, seeing as his papers literally swamp most of the state. The answer is “he’s just so focused on the bigger picture”, etc. etc. I have the same question Jack Krier: Why not focus on the local government? Honestly, how many regurgitation's of the hypocritical, fear bating, ignorant, spreading conservative hive mind bog stink do we really need to be bombarded with?

Obviously not enough, it seems. Jack Krier is yet another old white dood with enough money and boredom to instead of going gently in to that night, buys up publishing and writes his saber rattling nightmares, and knows full well he isn’t alone in his ramblings. I get it old man, you’re scared, and you have every right to your ignorance, it’s America dammit! But you do have the responsibility, to my mind, as a publisher of multiple papers, to enlighten and not spread your ignorance as fact. The temerity that you couch your bullshit in the “I’m just saying, you know me: old man, small town Jack” to support your nonsense is even more sickening than your poisonous rhetoric.

Much of my rage isn’t directly at Jack Krier. No, it’s mostly directed at these old white farts who will not rest until they shake every last ounce of pent up bile at the rest of us, and our need to rid ourselves of these roadblocks to progress and time. I respect their elderliness, I respect the time it took for them to foment their ignorance and save enough money to buy themselves a soapbox to prattle from. But I don’t have to listen to you ignore the decades of progress the younger generations are trying to stake out. You older generations kicked the proverbial can, and now want to tell us to fix it. You demand that we have boogiemen to fear and wage war against, and frankly I’ve spent most of my life fearing something or another, and am very, very tired of hiding from a boogieman that isn’t there. Sure, I’ll agree that the threat is very much real, but the amount I let it consume my life and my peers is completely up to us.

You can at least concede that your parents generation thought you were going to ruin the country too, unfortunately for us, you continued the same bullshit they were selling decades before you were given power.

This is the problem with the baby boomers and the old geezers, these generations are such that these old white doods will never let go. There will always be another scared white old man a few years younger, just waiting to tell the other generations what for. We as the current progressive generation need to stop chalking up their xenophobia with culture cuteness, and call them the bigots they are. Just because you live in a small town, doesn’t mean you get to feign ignorance to spread your hate. We need to let them know: “Yes, this is how things are going to be!” and to use some of their verbiage, “If you don’t like it, then you can get the fuck out!”.

Review: Dead Space 2

The Big takeaway: More Dead Space for those itching for a little horror house scares, and dismemberment gameplay.

The Little takeaway: A fierce rental at best. The 9 hour campaign is great, but the multiplayer lacks the depth to keep you coming back. The team based multiplayer obviously isn’t very fun if you don’t work together.

Review:
It’s been three years since Isaac Clarke had a wild ride on the crazy express, also known as the USG Ishimura from the first Dead Space. What with the dead girlfriend talking to him, he also had to disassemble a large portion of the crew that had been turned in to the hideous creatures known as the necromorphs. He dealt with abysmal asteroid shooting for a few minutes here and there, then blew up the marker what was causing all the problems to begin with.

In those three years after, Isaac Clarke has been absent-mindedly building another marker on a space colony called The Sprawl nestled away on the Saturn moon Titan. The game begins and he’s all straight jacketed up and living in crazy town from the looks of things. Dead Space 2 starts off with a bang, like any good haunted house. You won’t pick up any weapons for a good twenty minutes, and are dispatched right smack dab in a necromorph outbreak. It’s eye-grabbing, controller clenching good times from the word go, which is great, but that rush wears off pretty quickly as we settle in to the meat of the game.

Controls haven’t changed much since the first game, but the speed has. Isaac moves a lot faster than he did the last time around, it has to be all the space fiber he‘s been eating. It may be a compensation move for the multiplayer, but it’s really nice to be able to run away from the bad guys or through some of the larger areas in the Sprawl. This especially rings true in the final chapters of the game, where there’s just not enough time to stand back and lay waste to all your opponents. The zero gravity segments also get the speed treatment, adding rocket thrusters to Isaac’s suit. While they’re not as plentiful as the first game’s zero-g sections, they still are a lot of fun and gorgeous to boot!

Graphically, what this game does with lighting is phenomenal. Let’s face it, developers are squeezing every bit of horsepower out of these consoles, and it shows here. When the game opens up and shows off some outer space Saturn, or when you are around a furnace flame that bounces shadows around, putting you on edge as you rumble around the Sprawl, it looks great. The facial animations leave a lot to be desired, and come across as stiff. I would go so far as to say cartoonish at certain junctions, but it’s still fairly solid and doesn’t detract from the overall graphical package. There’s very few human characters to interact with, and for getting the point across, they’re fine.

The “puzzles” in this iteration leave a lot to be desired. I haven’t played the first Dead Space in a long while, but I could’ve swore they were better than this. Most of the “puzzles” are a “this thing is broken/missing, you need to find that corresponding piece then flip x switch to move forward”. Then you do that, monsters pop out, then you move forward. It’s pretty much: Explore, Shoot Monsters, Flip Switch, Puzzle (Enemy Pops Out), Restock items, Repeat. There is also a severe lack of set piece boss battles in this game. The game feints at the start to some epic boss encounters, then they dry up, and you're left just fighing stronger versions of the usual brand of necromorph. Compared to the first game, this is a bit of a let down and could've went further to spice up the pacing of the game, a la the first Dead Space.

Since the game is so short, there’s never really a feeling of redundancy. It took me about 9 hours, and I was honestly taking my time, reading/listening to everything, exploring, on and on. I guess the idea is that the multiplayer will pick up the slack.

Fortunately, the multiplayer works very well and isn’t a tacked on operation. It’s essentially team, objective based gameplay. One side is human doing objectives, the other side is necromorphs trying to stop them. There is no difference in the humans aside from color of suit. The necromorphs come in a variety of flavors, you have various necromorph types like the puker, the spitter, and two others I didn't really mess with. The game has your now standard leveling up system where you unlock new powers, guns or suits. The only real problem with the multiplayer is a lack of explaining clearly what each necromorph can do. The load screen in between matches enlightens from time to time, but you pretty much have to intuit what you can do. This also rings true for some of the objectives,. Sometimes it’s not very clear about where to go, who has what item to do what thing, what to defend, etc. Aside from that, if you do not act as a team in multiplayer, the experience isn’t very good. It took a group of us several matches to finally start communicating, once we did, the game played a lot better. I know that this may seem like a common sense thing, but we had a lot of people just playing it deathmatch style, and we soon found ourselves on the losing end. Also, the level design on the maps can be a bit labyrinthine in structure. The necromorphs can see through walls, and there’s this red filter on the screen, making the shadows much darker, and hard to see if you’re actually moving closer to the other team, or just running into a corner.

Instead of a multiplayer component for the next game, Visceral/EA should focus on co-op campaign, that’s the biggest takeaway from the multiplayer. When you work together, guarding flanks, providing cover fire while you finish objectives, the game is intense and satisfying. It mirrors the intensity and pace of the single player campaign, which is why you bought the game to begin with. You could add twists to the mechanics, provide more complex boss battles. Split the team up from time to time, you get the idea. There’s nothing inherently wrong with the multiplayer, there’s just not enough to it to justify why the focus was put in to that and not a co-op campaign which would make more sense from both story and game play perspectives. If the games genetic siblings Resident Evil 5 and the Gears of War series can provide that, why not try to add that Dead Space formula to a co-op campaign as well.

Paying sixty dollars for a fierce rental is a sticking point. The idea that a nine hour campaign is justifiable with the addition of a multiplayer component doesn’t work with all games. Seeing as the first Dead Space was a single player only kind of experience, that is the main draw for the sequel. The multiplayer is a nice cherry on top, but it is merely a dalliance, and then to be forgotten. On top of the multimedia campaign that comes with the Dead Space franchise, the comic books, novels, tie-in games/anime, the whole fandom of the series begins to take its toll financially, and it’s hard to justify a purchase that fills in a scant few holes.

Verdict: Fierce Rental.
--Or helpful trade in value after you exhaust the shallow multiplayer (if you’re a fan of the series and purchase it).

Cradle Robbing...

Image: Louisa Stokes / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

I didn’t really anticipate a sort of bookend to go with my last article. It has dawned on me in the past that a LOT of early 20-somethings have been popping up with the conservative mantra’s of yore, but I never really thought too much of it. A time long ago, I was also a perceived (mostly from self) intellectual monolith. I had the political game figured out, I drew my sides, I scoffed at rival party definitions, I snorted at those who had the temerity to claim “independent” or “swing”! I did my homework on candidates of all levels, and I got in to many a heated political debate just for the mere fun of the hunt. To spar, to wit, to walk away head help up high as to not catch the stench of defeat with the very nostrils of the victor.
Of course, this plan wrought great pains of labor later in my life, as I had become jaded by the lover “politician” realizing that vapid promises do not keep money in bank, therefore food on the table, and drink to fuel the debate. The lover that scorned me was the fall of Howard Dean.
Howard Dean was the answer I was looking for, he took no guff, and although an old white dood of the whitest doodery, he was still a spitfire on the old, withered, white man oaks that filled my political love life with dread. But, just as easily and passionately he came, he was outrageously outdone by Fox News, incessantly playing his rallying cry “Beeargh!” over and over and over again. This was in turn picked up by EVERY news outlet. Then Howard dean was undone, and that asshole who had destroyed my ability to care to cast a ballot was re-elected in 2004. Thus, the affair had died.
I still maintain my vigorous need to be knowledgeable about the state of our body politic. So that when I read things that are blatant lies, insults to my assumed intelligence, I can catch it and not let it ruin my opinion or lead me to be grossly informed. I prefer not being ignorant, who doesn’t? Well, lots of people it seems.
I find yet another young fresh face pops up from the Heritage Foundation. Learning that these “think tanks” with fancy non-partisan sounding names are anything of the sort. If it has a prestigious sounding name, like it would bake you an apple pie in the spare time or do your accounting for you, then it’s probably conservative, and full of inaccuracy, or to the layman: bold-faced shit eating lies!
Her name, Tina Korbe. Another young beautiful former beauty queen, who writes of wasteful government spending (as if there is any other type!).
As a cynic who recognizes cynic game, I tip my hat to the conservative movement. When it was discovered that most of the Sarah Palin fan club is middle-aged white men, I was not surprised. When I watch Fox News and see that most of the females are wearing short skirts, and the camera constantly pans back to show gorgeous shiny legs, I recognize the coy, cynical game that is afoot. A lot of these women supposedly have degrees, and were former lawyers.
When Tina Korbe is writing about wasteful spending, but needs the assistance of one Robert Bluey, I have to scratch my head a little. On closer inspection, she may be out of her element, what with writing staid puff pieces about women’s issues. But more importantly, I wonder why anyone would need two people to write an editorial? Especially one that lacks substance, and increasingly begs the reader with a mind to say “And, what exactly?” But this isn’t really my point.
A lot of these fresh faced up-and-coming pundits-in-waiting seem to just be conservative painting by numbers. The only colors being Red State Rouge, and the occasional Reagan Rose. I find it rather humorous that they weren’t even alive during most of the implementations of the various “problems” they now write about weekly. Hrm, a Congressional policy that’s been enacted for over 33 years, is now a complete and utter travesty of the worse ilk because Democrats are now in charge? The fact that government has been mostly under the control of Republican regimes for various long stretches of time over those said decades, and that one would think, using Tina Korbe’s logic, would fix these problems, is never addressed! Ever!
This is written by purportedly highly educated people! I could understand, and refrain from losing my mind, if it was the local republican, with his associates degree in plumbing, and a worn “W” sticker on his truck’s rear window writing in to the local paper. You have to wonder if Tina Korbe has every challenged her ideology in all her years of university. If the only internship available to her was some Republican with a thing for corn-fed Midwestern blondes.
I don’t mistake that a lot of these new conservatives were never alive to see the corruption and chaos that was wrought under Republican control. Or to see that in the grand scheme of things worrying about the women’s movement from a subset of America that admonishes the freethinking, mindful women’s liberation movement. Never felt the sting of impoverishment, or needed scholarships to be the first person of their family to finish college.
The willful acknowledgement to rewrite the history books is not lost on a lot of people. It is easier to rewrite if you are ignorant of the context that bore it. Conservatives need, and yes, feast on these young minds because intelligence is their mortal enemy. In a world where that very day’s news can be twisted and fomented in to something otherworldly and let’s face it, wrong; it is easy keep turning the young face forward and whisper sweet nothings from an imaginary bygone era in to their ear.
With unchallenged ethics and unchanged hearts and minds, these young people are a feast for the old, fat, tired, fearful white old doods of yesteryear. If you can couch your racism in airy indignation and ferocity of youth, then you will. If you can add new wood and steel to the starboard of your ship from the fresh oaks, and fiery furnaces from the mill of idiocy and forest of blindness of youth, then you will to fight the tide of progress.
I am not trying to demean the intelligence of any young conservative writer, or insult their perceived intelligence. But I do challenge them to test themselves and their beliefs with reality, then if they are found wanting, to go back to their ignorance, and inability to tackle real issues with government and the United Sates in general, not just nationally, but locally. Be a human being and grow out from your ideology and gain real insight, or at least be realistic about your shameless, corporate funded whore hive mind.