Three Years of Utter Misery: A Charge Shot!!! Retrospective

It is with a heavy heart that Charge Shot!!! passes from my life. To think that was so short a three years ago that Andrew, Craig, and Rob asked me to join them on this little adventure of theirs. I was honored, of course, but confused. You see, as some of you may remember, in the turbulent era of Charge Shot!!!'s ascendancy, this was a strictly video game blog. Strange as that may seem now, considering how much "new millennium culture blog" has come to mean to me (with all its lack of meaning), we once had so narrow a mission. But that's the blog the Founding Fathers wanted to write, and hell if I would turn down such an laurel as being chosen to contribute.

But you see, I didn't really like video games anymore. Sure, I played Mario Kart and Smash Bros. even more than the average college student, but I hadn't put up the funds for a new game in years. I didn't even own a seventh generation system in my own right. I didn't feel like I had a right to spew my thoughts on these things at all. But hey, I liked to write, and my senior comps were almost done (mine were on the evolution of knightly roles in medieval literature and history) so why not take the excuse to hang out online with my nerdy friends?

What had started as a somewhat awkward social obligation blossomed into a hobby, and later into a genuine passion. And I couldn't do any less than thank the readers, editors, and fellow writers for the experience.


Something I noticed since I started "working here" is that my posts have made a transition from rage-tinted expressions of frustration that video games weren't like they were in my 64-bit heyday to me pretending that exploring the hollowness of modern pop culture's nether regions wasn't a blast to me.

Yes, I suppose that my masochism is finally out of the closet. To continue with the Green Day theme, I have been, and always shall be Charge Shot!!!'s dominated love slave.



I never really thought about it, but my favorite Charge Shot!!! memories all happen to involve me being sad and angry and in pain from some terrible movie or TV show playing in front of me. Look back to the bad old days: there's my Shackleton-esque expedition to the Spike Video Game Awards (the twenty-first century Nuremberg rally), the fact that I paid my own goddamn money to see Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li, and do we even need to bring up the one-man Decade Of Dreck?

Even going back to my first podcast appearence, when the four of us talked about how bad the Doom movie was and the similarities between the far superior Mortal Kombat film and porno flicks. I'll always remember Skyping the editors from the comfort of my college apartment's basement laundry room (I needed the privacy) only to have future Charge Shooter!!! Jordan Pedersen walk in on me and awkwardly appear on the podcast. All this blog seemed to do was make me miserable, and I loved every minute of it.

Then there were the happy times: my two Octobers of horror movies, sixty two in all, was honestly-to-blog a big turning point in my life, where I went from scared little boy to genre savant. And then there was Mad Men, oh my sweet Mad Men. Both these were great in their own right, except for that part where I had to write blog posts every day for the former or late Sunday night for the latter. Man, even when I was happy it sucked.

Except New York Comic Con, that was an all-time high for me. I got to meet Bruce Campbell because of this blog!

Yes, Charge Shot!!! is ending for now. And part of me will appreciate the fact that I don't have to worry about getting giving up a spot in my Netflix queue for prospective Decade Of Dreck entry Harry And Max (Read the synopsis on that one!) but it still saddens me to leave this behind for now. Perhaps some day, one or some or all of us will muster up the will to do this whole blogging thing again further down the line when we're more settled as human beings. I think Decade Of Dreck or Nights On Bald Mountain could certainly pop up again in the not-too-distant future as a solo blog, but for now:

SEE YOU SPACE COWBOY ...