A Short Break

Hey everybody! After a long weekend and spending some great quality time with Style, my one month of perfect posting has come to a close. Yesterday I forgot to make a post, so that ends the streak for now.

I'm going to take a short break from posting every day, and work to get a bunch queued up for when school starts up again. I appreciate the support everyone has shown in reading my posts as they go up. Seeing all the people reading what I ramble about each day is truly heartwarming. So for the next little while, I won't be posting every day.

Rest assured, this blog will continue, it's not ending here. I just want to make sure that I can give you all the best content I can. I wrote a rushed post a few days ago, and I felt terrible about it. It wasn't up to my personal standard but I felt that maintaining my posting schedule was important. Consistency is important, but so is the quality of my writing. Hence, the break. I want to get back to writing at the level I expect of myself while also sticking to my posting schedule.

Some posts may make it up to keep things interesting, but until I get back on schedule, I wish you all the best! See you in a bit!

Toodles!

I Wrote This For You // The First Sign is Taking Strange Pictures

*Language warning today

It's interesting how by attaching a word to something can completely change how it is  perceived. Two people sitting on a couch watching Netflix sounds normal. Call it a relationship, and suddenly that evening could be a date. An evening of sex with someone could be fucking or it could be making love, both have different imagery attached. Someone will fiercely defend whether they are a geek or a nerd.

Attaching words to things has a certain power about it. As someone who loves to write, the words people choose when they write or speak is incredibly interesting to me.


The First Sign is Taking Strange Pictures

I have pretended to go mad in order to tell you things I need to. I call it art. Because art is the word we give to our feelings made public. And art doesn't worry anyone.

*Reminder that I take no credit for this work. It does not belong to me, I did not make it, I make no claim to it other than the feelings it evokes in me.

Toodles!

War Dragons

There are a crap-ton of games out there now. Mobile gaming has exploded in the last few years with the introduction of larger phones and tablets (Gameboys will always have a special place in my heart). But like any gaming industry, mobile gaming is full of both fantastic and abysmal games.

I'm going to make this review short, because it's not a great game. War Dragons is a game for the iPad.

Graphics: 3.5 out of 5
Pretty cool looking dragons, the graphics take advantage of the iPad graphics processor between battles. During the flights the graphics take a pretty big dip down though.

Gameplay: 2 out of 5
The combat system is super grind-heavy and repetitive. The enemy defences quickly out damage your dragons if you don't use all of your cooldowns. You also are unable to dodge attacks or change your flight path. You fly at the speed the game wants you to, and in a straight line into the enemy tower assaults.

Overall: 1 out of 5
The game is very much a "pay-to-win" model, with structure upgrades, dragon creation, and damage recovery all being on fairly long timers without paying for the upgraded versions. It's kind of a fun game for the first few levels, but then the upgraded bases begin to destroy your dragons.


Sorry for the short post today, I didn't get around to writing a full review until fairly late. Tomorrow and Sunday should be more up to the regular par.

Toodles!

Priest

Movies about vampires go back for decades, and having a sect of holy men leading a fight against them goes back almost as long. Priest is a movie set in a post apocalyptic future where animalistic vampires have been fighting with humans for generations. Despite technological advances, humankind slowly is losing the war. They create giant, walled cities to protect their remaining numbers, and discover their only hope of defeating the vampires lies in their training of priests, ironically. These priests somehow attain supernatural speed and strength and use the generous funding of the church to gain specialized weapons for taking out the vampires. Once the priests succeed in single-handedly winning the war, the vampires that remain are herded into reserves. With the war over, the priests are sent back into the general population, where they fade into obscurity. For a time, everything seems peaceful. (Then everything changed when the Fire Nation attacked...)

Face, meet Stabby McStabstab. Stabby, meet Face.

The movie has some decent action scenes, which it should for a movie with so many plot holes. The origin of the superhuman priests is never discussed, other than that they a chosen by the church and trained to fight the vampires. The characters have just enough depth to keep the viewers attention, but have little history or development.

The opening animation. The whole movie should have been done like this.

The graphic nove

Honestly, the best part of the movie is the opening animated sequence. It give the most story, has well animated action, and would make for a more interesting movie, in my opinion. This is probably because the movie is based on a Korean graphic novel, Priest by Hyung Min-Woo.

Story: 2 out of 5
Really. There's not a lot explained for backstory and the characters lack depth. Certainly an action movie, and that's all.

Visual: 4 out of 5
The opening animation is cool, some of the fights are cool, and I've definitely seen worse CG monsters.

Overall: 3 out of 5
Priest is an action movie to the core. The story is fairly weak, but the action scenes are pretty good. I think it's worth one watch, but don't go in with huge expectations.


Toodles!

Benny Greb

A lot of the music I've posted about has either been very mellow or from a video game. This week, I decided to branch out a little and give some exposure to an artist a lot of people probably don't know about *pushes glasses up nose*. As a percussionist and a music educator, I attend conventions that have some of the most amazing and inspiring artists from around the world. One such person is Benny Greb. Considered to be one of the best drummers in the world right now (he was a feature panelist at the Percussive Arts Society International Convention, so don't bite my head off for that statement), Benny Greb has absolutely astonishing mastery over the drum set. One of his albums, Grebfruit, is almost exclusively him playing drum set overtop of multi-tracks of himself singing a capella.

Below is the title track for the album. The first few seconds are a little goofy, but then the drumming starts and it gets amazing. Try and focus on the drums while listening, and realize that the drum parts are not multi-tracked in. He's literally playing all of that live.

People ask me why I don't usually like popular music nowadays. After hearing drum parts like this, you try going back to electronically produced drum loops or listening to a rock beat played over and over for five minutes.

In addition to singing and playing drum set, Benny Greb also plays a beautiful piece on piano on this particular album. It's got a simplicity to it that just resonates with me. I tear up a little every time I listen to it, and I have no idea why.

Benny Greb's music is available on iTunes, or you can get the CD's from his official website. and I highly recommend buying his albums. Once again, please don't illegally download music. Musicians pour their body and souls into their music. It won't kill you to pay for their time instead of buying a large coffee tomorrow.

Toodles!

Eating Right Can Be Hard

A huge part about getting into shape (and staying there) is your diet. What can be frustrating about it is trying to gauge how many calories you actually consume in a day. It can be shocking what foods contain high or low concentrations of calories if you never paid attention to that kind of thing before. Four prunes has the same amount of calories as an entire plate of asparagus, for example. Speaking of examples, we come to today's post topic.

Spark People has created a few pictures that can help you think more about what you're eating. They have a series of images depicting different kinds of foods, all amounting to 100 calories. Some of them are quite shocking in the difference in amount.

All this said, the amount of calories you eat is not the only factor that affects your health. Proper nutrition, exercise, water, sleep, and mental well being all are factors in staying in good shape. Genetics are all well and good when you're younger, but there are studies that show that genetic history only affects your younger life, aside from hereditary conditions. The lifestyle choices you make have a much greater impact on how long and how well you can live.

Toodles!

One Month of Posts!

With today's post going up, I have officially written something every day for the last month. Four weeks of perfect posting!

Thanks to everyone who comes here to read my ramblings. I've gone from having a couple of views a day, to a solid 15-20 daily readers, plus a few extras on Mondays. I can't express how much it means to have people actually care about the things I have to say.

You may notice that some of the posts look a little funny. I adjusted the width of the blog to allow for bigger pictures. Future posts should look better.

Here's to more posts in the future, and looking forward to getting more comments from all of you!

Poro loves poro-snacks. No reasons necessary.

I love you all like how Poro loves his snacks.

Toodles!