Stop reading this blog right now and go watch the Netflix reboot of She-Ra and the Princesses of Power. Seriously. Go. NOW. Git, I say, GIT! Shoo!
...
Are you still here?! Whaddid I just say? Scram! You should be watching it right now!
Oh, very well. I guess if you insist on reading, I can't stop you.
The trouble with a show as good as She-Ra is that it raises the bar so high that most everything else just feels like a disappointment afterwards. She-Ra is
I recently picked out a new show to watch, and I decided to try Disney's Amphibia. I'd seen about ten seconds of it on tv years ago and thought it looked cute. Nice art style, looked like it had potential. A little while earlier, I had tried Ever After High, a show about fair tale students that is, I am given to understand, set in the same universe as Monster High... I think. It looked great--the art style was certainly beautiful--but I was bored out of my mind. I really wanted to like it,
It's been a long time since I've written in the blog. *Checking*... holy crap! Almost exactly one year??!! Wow. Time flies.
I have something I'd like to talk about. I forget if or how much I've written about this, so I'll just approach it anew, which will be better for someone reading my blog for the first time, anyway. Let's try a hypothetical, shall we? A little thought experiment. This one is more intended for the ladies, but all are welcome to participate. Pretend that you know
When I was a young kid, about 7 or so I think, my parents gave me two VHS tapes of the 90's X-Men: The Animated Series as a gift. These tapes were titled Creators' Choice, volumes 1 and 2. These were the tapes including these round table discussions at the beginning, in case any of you old timers remember that:
These volumes contained the first four episodes of the series. Volume 1 was Night of the Sentinels part 1 and 2, and volume 2 was Enter Magneto and Deadly Reunions. These two t
This entry will be somewhat different. I just experienced something extraordinary, and I wanted to write it down while it's fresh.
At about 5 am, I pulled back the curtains on my kitchen window and peeked out. Expecting to see drizzling rain, I was surprised to see snow, which is rare in my area. But what left me awed and transfixed was just how hauntingly beautiful this perfect scene was. I watched large, fluffy snowflakes slowly and softly falling in the eerily still, deathly silent p
This is a sister entry to the previous blog about The Lion Guard. It is recommended to read that one first before proceeding.
In my previous entry I gushed about Disney's The Lion Guard, and how they included a brilliant, sensitive, emotional, and lovingly crafted death scene. That scene got me thinking more about something I've thought about occasionally for a long time, and that's the strange beauty of sadness.
There are definitely a few emotions that I could do without. Anger, fr
Disclaimer: moderate spoilers. Spoilers will be fairly vague without names or specific details and won't ruin the show, but if you're interested in Disney's The Lion Guard and want a completely spoiler-free experience, then watch it before proceeding.
One of my complaints about Friendship is Magic was their refusal to touch the beginning or end of life. I always thought it was kinda weak and lame that they were forbidden to actually have a character die for real (as opposed to ambiguously
I don't think I need to spend much time explaining the problem of horrendously overworked employees at triple-A game studios to anyone here. Unless you've been living under a rock for the past decade, I'm sure you're well aware of the so-called "crunch" times at big game studios where employees are forced to work 80 hours a week to meet deadlines. The one that has probably gotten the most attention was Rockstar with RDR2.
I think we're all on the same page here--I don't think a single one
*Relatively spoiler-free*
I absolutely love Disney movies, especially the animated classics of the Disney renaissance. Beauty & the Beast is one of my favorite movies of any kind of all time, and The Little Mermaid also holds a special place in my metaphorical heart. I'm also a person who loathes and despises half-assed, crappy, cash-grab sequels, unwelcome belated continuations, and basically any other poorly-executed, lore-damaging entries in franchises. I often wish that movies/sh
Most of us have been asked this question by a friend at least once in our lives. Seems like a simple yes or no, right? Wrong. Although it's astronomically unlikely that anyone would ever ask me this question again, if anyone actually asked me, "can you keep a secret?", my response would be, "that's complicated", and I would then explain to them what I'm about to explain to you.
But before we get into it, I'd like to tell you about our new merch!
Yeah right. Lol.
Okay, so a
I enjoy reviewing animated shows in this blog, like LPS and Miraculous Ladybug. I'd like to talk about anime as well, but it's too overwhelming to try to write a separate blog about every show I watch. It's too many, and let's be honest--who the hell wants to read all that anyway? That's why I've decided to lump it all together into one entry where I list my anime recommendations with just a couple of spoiler-free tidbits about each one. This blog will be on-going. I will periodically updat
I wrote this about six weeks ago. Just been sitting on it until today.
I've been enjoying a show on Netflix called Reign. It's a historical drama about the royal French court in the middle ages. I don't know how much of it is accurate and how much is made up. It's certainly dramatized to be fun, but it's loosely based on real people and events. I'd describe as being like Game of Thrones mixed with a soap opera. It's kinda silly and melodramatic, but it's fun. I like it.
But ther
After finishing Littlest Pet Shop, I immediately dove right into LPS: A World of Our Own.
(Relatively) spoiler-free. Basic premise discussion only. No specific story stuff.
AWOOO is just a short spin-off. It's not a full show. Just one season, and the episodes are half-length. 11-ish minutes a pop. But there's 52 episodes in the season, so it works out to the length or one normal season. However, it's not really feasible to do any complex stories with such little bite-sized time
TL;DR: Littlest Pet Shop is a good show. If you like MLP (and if you're reading this, then you obviously do), then you'll like LPS. If you're interested, go watch it before reading this blog.
This is going to be a spoiler-ridden discussion of Littlest Pet Shop. I gave LPS a shot because the animation and art style is extremely similar to FIM, and about half of the staff from FIM worked on LPS. I wasn't disappointed. It's quite good. It's no Pony, for sure, but good. I recommen
Every so often, just for a larf, I like to look up what the most viewed videos of all time on youtube are. If you just google it, you'll find several sites that post these stats. As far as I am aware, there is no real-time counter like the world population or US national debt clocks. It's just lists of the top ten or twenty most viewed videos as of the time of posting. I haven't thought about it in a long time, though. Been busy. Last time I checked was... oh, about eight or so years ago.
It's been awhile, but today I'm going to write about something deadly serious again. Hopefully this post won't violate forum rules about controversy. I don't think it will. It's not going to touch any of the banned, taboo subjects. I think it should be fine. We'll see. Fingers crossed.
This is a topic I already talked about in the Grind My Gears posts "Litter" and "Glitter", but it's so important that I felt it demanded more serious and comprehensive attention.
Regardless of your
I recently finished watching Legend of Korra, the sequel series to Avatar: The Last Airbender. I absolutely feel that the bending franchise are by far the greatest kid's shows ever made. Sorry, Pony, but it's true. I mean, there's really no comparison. Now, don't get me wrong, Pony is phenomenal, and holds a special place in my figurative heart. I will always have a soft spot for the cute, feminine, girly stuff like Poneh, but the bending franchise is in another league. But to be fair, Pon
Today's blog will be a little different. No philosophy, no show reviews. Instead, a cautionary tale from my past, and a little helpful advice for a healthier life.
So, I don’t know if any of you are familiar with Instant Breakfast. It’s been “Carnation Breakfast Essentials” for some years now, but it will always be Instant Breakfast to me. It’s a powered chocolate milk nutritional drink/meal replacement. I started drinking it as a little kid because I was such a picky eater that it was
It's one thing to be late to the party; it's another to never know there was a party to begin with.
Having finished all of the currently existing Mirickuless, I moved to Avatar: The Last Airbender based on a friend's glowing recommendation. Oh sure, I was aware of its existence. I've heard of it. Yeah, of course. But I never really heard much about it back in the day. I didn't know that it was supposed to be some kind of phenomenon. (Unlike, say, Squid Game, for example, which beats y
This is a spoiler-free discussion of Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug & Cat Noir.
It's been a long time since I posted in Stop & Talk. Since they nerfed the forums, I haven't had anything interesting to say. (I'm referring of course to the rules disallowing controversial content.) I finally have something I feel like writing about.
A couple months or so ago, I wrote a Grind My Gears post complaining about half-assed CGI. I bemoaned the fact that for decades now, so many studios
Episodes, movies, specials, spin-offs, shorts, books, toys, apparel, cosplay, music, fan art, fanfics, reviews, posts, blogs, fan videos, memes, animations, 3D models, video game mods, and yes--for me, even clop. When I look back at the past five years since I discovered the show and add up every minute that I've devoted to Pony, it's pretty staggering. And I wouldn't trade it for anything. Well... except for a girlfriend. I'm only human.
I've loved this MLP journey so much. I can har
It's a common joke that the girlfriend will give her boyfriend a hard time for buying too many video games. Y'know, "whaddyu need with an Xbox, a Playstation, and a PC? Why do you need so many games?!", and so forth. But then the boyfriend will return the favor and criticize her for doing the same thing with shoes. That's always the stereotype--women love shoes and will fill a whole closet with them. Well, I guess I'm an anomaly--I do both.
I have an embarrassing number of game systems
Of the four basic literary comparative devices, the only one that most people are familiar with is the "metaphor"--the figure of speech in which a term or phrase is applied to something to which it is not literally applicable in order to suggest a resemblance. We all know what metaphors are. We typically use them on a daily basis. Many people may also be familiar with the term "simile"--a figure of speech in which two unlike things are explicitly compared. Similes tend to use the words "like
I live in a culture (The United States of America) which manages to be obsessed with physical beauty and sexuality, while at the same time demonizing it. No easy feat. It's also no secret where the vilification comes from--it's our religious and puritanical roots. I'm told that not every culture has the bass-ackwards perspective on sex that we do, and that many of those cultures think we're completely bat-sh*t insane. No surprise there. And of course, there are cultures with far more unheal
*EDIT* I originally had an image of some busty women in swimsuits for the cover picture, but the staff recently decided that it was "a little too much"... ...after five years. Whatever. That's fine. I couldn't think of anything else that made sense for the cover picture, and my obsessive personality won't allow me to leave just one blog cover image blank, so, as a joke, I just thought I'd go hard in the complete opposite direction for the cover picture. And now, on with the show...
