Today’s comic comes at the expense of our beloved game “couple?”, struggling against the odds that would so constantly separate them. Since a certain “Santa” has graced us with our very own copy of Mario Galaxy 2 (Thank You!!), we have been able to partake in the latest delights from the mind of Miyamoto. As with the first Galaxy game, should you happen to continue from a save file you will find yourself devoid of life. Inexplicably, any 1-ups previously obtained are gone and you instead start with a stock of 4. The game has a way of encouraging you though in the way of a letter from our dear Peach. It does beg the question: How exactly does she send these letters to Mario while in the captivity of Bowser and his little boy? Where in the Mushroom Kingdom does she find these 1-up mushrooms to send to Mario? Hopefully my wild imagination will explain these complicated conundrums that beg to be answered!

Wow, this comic is quite a bit late from what we originally intended. Life has a funny way of catching up with us and diverting our focus, to be sure. Pie and I took a break out to take care of a long term goal in our old MMO, Ragnarok Online, which ended up creating quite a lot of backlash in terms of comic publication! Kind of silly to put real life goals aside for game ones – even though I know this to be true, I can’t help but want to play just as hard as I work! We hope to rectify this by publishing a couple more this week to make up for our lack of posting lately. It also helps that we have no real Independence Day plans AND we aren’t going to Anime Expo this year.

Ahh….Anime Expo… What happened? Where has the magic gone? I used to look forward to going to AX with such fervor before. I would take off vacation from work, rent a hotel room with friends and just drown myself in anime overdosing. One might think that age is a key factor in it. After all, I’m simply not as young as I used to be when I first started attending AX. Reflecting on it though, I can’t help but feel that it is AX that has changed more than I have.

First of all, the biggest deterrent is their new pricing structure. The price has been creeping up over the years, but it has been rather drastic once the convention started invading downtown Los Angeles. A few years back (like 3-4?) you could get tickets for $55 at the door. When I checked a MONTH ago, the price was $75 at the door. NOW I look at it (well, maybe 4 days ago) and it is $85 at the door. Seriously?! I’m pretty sure I’m not mistaken…but I believe that within the last month before the event, the door price increased a full $10!! On top of all that, they are now charging EXTRA for MOST MAIN EVENTS?!? How outrageous is that? I don’t give a DAMN that it’s at the Nokia Theater – that shit is ridiculous. Charging for Masquerade is a crime – half of the skits aren’t even interesting or professional.

Another thing that I’m not too keen on is the venue itself. I’m not a big fan of THAT downtown Los Angeles. Oh, I love parts of downtown. The REAL parts; Olvera Street, Little Tokyo, and surrounding areas like Elysian Park/Silver Lake/Los Feliz, East LA/Lincoln Heights come to mind. I’m just not a big fan of the overly corporate sections of the new downtown that has been plagued with gentrification. It took everything that was great about the city (the people) and replaced it with a bunch of shitty look-alike up-scale apartment buildings. I always found it funny that when the recession was just starting that downtown LA apartment construction was BOOMING. The area that AX is now held at reminds me of something akin to Mirror’s Edge; in cleaning up the city, it took away everything that made it wonderful. Where is my BBQ King Burger joint on the corner of Chavez (Sunset) and Figueroa you asses?

Well, I don’t think that Anime Expo will be changing venues or price structures any time soon, so I guess I’ll have to deal with it. For now I suppose we will try and make it next year. Hopefully by then Life in Aggro will have caught on! Here’s hoping!!

I'm thinking that writing an entry right after working on a comic is probably not the best idea since I generally can't come up with a good rant topic when the time calls for it. Since we plan on dishing out extra work this week, I suppose I'm free to write about something that was on my mind a couple days ago.

Raisin Bran, yes... the cereal... Bear caught me a few weeks ago with a box of raisins out while having a "serving" of Raisin Bran and laughed at the idea that I might have added raisins to my "serving." >.> Yes, I was planning to because not having enough raisins in your Raisin Bran can be really annoying. @_@ It always seems that whenever you have a new box of cereal, all the raisins fall to the bottom of the bag. Have you noticed? The raisins become more and more plentiful as you reach the bottom! I understand that it's not the manufacturer that's to blame and that it's just a physics thing but it's so frustrating! I opened a new bag of cereal about a week ago one morning while being kinda tired and cranky and got really pissed off because my first serving of Raisin Bran out of the box only had THREE raisins! Yes! THREE!!... lol... I wonder if there's a way to overcome this problem. o_<