2020 January
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Hopefully managing to read at least one book at month this year, kicking it off with Atomic Habits by James Clear. I forget where I heard of this book, but it's highly recommended and an Amazon best-seller. I followed the author on Twitter for a while before deciding to buy the book. I read it sporadically through the month. It's not very long - less than 300 pages on the Kindle app. The book is fairly good and insightful, although I'm not sure if there are any ideas I haven't encountered elsewhere (especially if you read a lot of self-improvement
2019 December
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Been watching a lot of things this December. I finally got back on The Expanse after finishing S1 more than a year ago. I only finished S2, but it was already a vast improvement over S1. S1 felt like a lot of meandering around until the characters actually ran into the plot. S2 was stronger, faster-paced, and there's always a lot of things going on in each episode. I really like this series now, looking forward to S3 and S4 when I have the time. Netflix-wise, I enjoyed their recently-added Jeopardy series (always a great show to have playing in
2019 November
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Aha! I finally managed to finish a book again! I've heard of Cal Newport since years ago tangentially due to his Study Hacks blog, which was pretty good at the time. I haven't followed his career too closely, but he's an academic at Georgetown apparently. I wasn't looking for any career advice in particular, but I did have a recommendation for this book from somewhere so I thought I'd give it a go. The book is So Good They Can't Ignore You, and focuses on what it takes to have a "successful career". My favorite thing about this book is
2019 March
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The big one this month was Captain Marvel. I posted the usual spoiler-free review over on Tumblr, but I have some more spoiler-y thoughts over here: (Spoilers) Not much else to report. The Arrowverse is limping along. Recent episodes of Supergirl have been great, I loved Jon Cryer as Lex Luthor, and I love how they've been able to adapt multiple comic book storylines this season such as What's So Funny About Truth, Justice, & the American Way?, American Alien and Red Son. (Excuse me, red daughter.) In more sci-fi land, The Orville has been fantastic, with their surprise twist
2019 February
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Some things I've been watching lately, aside from the usual TV shows I follow: I watched Alita: Battle Angel, with the friend who introduced me to the series in the first place. The movie looked fantastic and the fight scenes were great. Plot was supercondensed, several books' worth of story combined into one. Ended in a weird place, kinda? Easily the best western live action anime adaptation by far. On Feb. 7, 2019, 10:06 p.m. I wrote: Watched Alita: Battle Angel earlier today. Pretty good. Fast pace, excellent visuals and fight scenes. They tried to cram a lot of the
2019 January
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Some things I've been watching lately, aside from the usual TV shows I follow: Bumblebee only came out over here in January (thanks to the usual MMFF shenanigans), and I decided to watch it on a whim. Pretty decent soft reboot, read my spoiler-free review over on the Tumblr The first half of Young Justice Outsiders is out, and it's pretty good. Focus is back on a smaller group after the larger team in YJ season 2. A few new characters are introduced and I learned about a couple of DC heroes I wasn't familiar with before. Probably still the
2018 December
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Some things I've been watching lately, aside from the usual TV shows I follow: I very much enjoyed Elseworlds, the Arrowverse crossover this year. I mean sure, a lot of it didn't make any sense, but it was like a love letter to DC fans. I actually consider myself more of a Marvel fan than DC, but I still loved it! I wrote a spoiler-free review over on the Tumblr. I found Better Call Saul on a couple of "Best TV of 2018" lists so I decided to catch up with it since it was on Netflix. I was actually
2018 November
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Some things I've been watching lately, aside from the usual TV shows I follow: For some reason, I watched two biopics this month. The first one is Hidden Figures, about three black women who were instrumental during the early days of NASA leading up to the Friendship 7 mission piloted by John Glenn. The movie is fairly interesting if you are even remotely interested in either the challenges faced in black history or math and science or the early days of the space program competition between the USA and Russia. It feels even more appropriate to have watched this since
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I said in my previous Duelyst review that Eternal didn't really hook me. That was in Feb 2017. I stopped playing Duelyst after around six months. I started playing Eternal regularly July of that year, and have been playing regularly ever since. What changed my mind? I'm not sure, but once I got around to playing Eternal regularly, I found myself enjoying it. I think one of the main factors is that out of all the online ccgs I've tried, Eternal is the one that's closest to Magic the Gathering. That's not really surprising, since a number of Eternal's lead -
Finally had the time to play Marvel's Spider-Man for PS4. Took just a little under two weeks from start to Platinum. Maybe mild, unmarked spoilers somewhere in this review, be warned! Overall: the game was amazing and spectacular and fun, especially for a big comic book fan like me, well worth the buy. Mechanics: Combat felt a bit weird to me at first, mainly because I was expecting it to be closer to Arkham-style combat, and I kept trying to use Spider-Man's Circle Dodge the same way I use Batman's Triangle counter, and that got me clocked by the first -
(“Late Game Review" because I’m trying to play through games on my ridiculously old backlog, so these games are pretty old) The Elder Scrolls V Skyrim came out on 11/11/2011. I remember I bought the game for Steam on launch day. I finally "finished" it after 350 hours of gameplay and seven years real-time. "Finished" in this case means "achievement complete", not just "main quest complete", because as any Bethesda gamer knows, that’s not how their RPGs roll. I had been looking forward to this game because I had previously enjoyed both ES4: Oblivion and Fallout 3 on PS3 and
2018 October
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Some things I've been watching lately, aside from the usual TV shows I follow: Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan (on Amazon Prime) -- surprisingly good, even if I'm not too familiar with the Jack Ryan stuff. I only know John Krasinski from The Office, Spoilers for Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan: (Spoilers) Daredevil season 3 (on Netflix) -- I enjoyed the season a lot. I posted a spoiler-free review over on the ireadcomicbooks tumblr. Over here I can post spoilers. (Spoilers) Venom -- I initially wasn't planning on watching this given the terrible early reviews, but eventually I was like, hey I
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I've had a copy of this book for quite a while now, but for some reason only got around to starting on it three days ago. It's not a particularly long book, but I pretty much devoured it in twenty four hours. The book traces the paths of the lives of John Romero and John Carmack -- two legends of the software development world that changed PC gaming forever. It's a fantastic read for anyone who grew up playing PC games during the 80s and 90s. It gives us a birds-eye view of what the burgeoning gaming industry was like -
("Late Game Review" because I'm trying to play through games on my ridiculously old backlog, so these games are pretty old) I got my digital PS3 copy of Ni No Kuni during some kind of PSN sale a while back for like $10 and seeing as how the sequel came out recently, I figured I'd better finish the first game before my rarely-used PS3 decides to die on me. Anyway, the game was great and I enjoyed it enough to go for the platinum (post-game was a bit grindy though): Visually, it's a very pretty game, animated Ghibli-style. The combat -
This started as one of those silly Facebook memes where you post one thing every day and didn't have to explain and you tagged other people and they continued with the meme. I was very bad at following the meme instructions, but I did find the exercise interesting. I found it difficult to identify 10 specific movies, and since I didn't explain during the FB posts, I thought I'd make a blog post about them instead. So here we go! Back to the Future When I started the meme, this was the only movie I was sure would be on -
I realise it's a bit weird for me to be reviewing a marketing book, given my self-proclaimed aversion to marketing and sales. A while back I wrote a review for Tim Ferris' book Tribe of Mentors on this blog, and for some reason someone decided to contact me citing this review and asked if I would review this other book and they would give me a complimentary copy. This was something new to me, so I thought I'd try it out! (I guess this a thing I do know. Feel free to send me books on random topics to review!)
2017 June
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My first Persona game was Persona 4 Golden on the Vita -- a fantastic game. After that I dived into Persona 3 Portable and eventually the spin-off games Persona 4 Arena (and Ultimax) and Persona Q on 3DS. So it was no surprise that one of the game releases I was most looking forward to this year would be the next numbered game in the series: Persona 5 on the Playstation 4. Like P4G before it, the focus is on the school life of a young man forced into a new environment, interspersed with some good old JRPG dungeon crawling.
2017 May
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First, the spoiler-free summary (spoilers after this part): overall a very entertaining movie to sit down and watch popcorn and to enjoy the jokes and the space battles and the different colored lights and the tiny adorable tree creature GOTG's humor was one of its strong points and for the 2nd movie, they push the comedy up a notch, perhaps a little too much in some places. Lots of funny gags and one-liners I felt like some of the character/background development stuff was pushed a bit too hard as well the movie's plot also felt a bit thin and straightforward.
2017 March
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With The FFXIII trilogy not being particularly well-received and FFXIV being an MMO, Final Fantasy XV has been a long awaited as the next mainline single-player game in the much-acclaimed series. This review will have minor spoilers. Story FFXV follows the story of Noctis, prince of Lucis and his band of brothers (okay they're not really brothers, but they might as well be). They're supposed to be on a road trip to get Noctis married, but things happen along the way and eventually they have to figure out how to liberate their homeland from The Evil Empire. That's the backstory. -
4k XLocal tech blog YugaTech is doing a giveaway of a Sony X8000D Bravia 4K TV. To be honest I wasn't sure about using this blog to participate in a promo, but I was already in the market for a new TV since our living room TV is already starting to have some problems. I checked out the product features of the Sony X8000D Bravia on their website. Some of the features stood out for me specifically: 4K HDR -- this means you get to watch high definition 4k videos. Perfect for those who really enjoy high quality displays. The