[TV] Gravity Falls: Season 1

The internet on its own is an organic recommendation engine for things that you might like. Just join any forum or social media community centered around a fandom and eventually you'll notice crossover conversations about related media that they enjoyed that they feel is similar to the core fandom you've come together to talk about.

This brings us to Gravity Falls, a Disney series that often gets cited when one talks about shows like Adventure Time. Both shows have more than their fair share of mysteries and this Disney take on a mystery series of sorts is pretty fun in its own right.

I wouldn't necessarily say it's a perfect comparison - tonally the shows are extremely different and the characters may be a little quirky, but they're not totally crazy as a lot of the Adventure Time characters seem to be. But that's neither here nor there - they don't need to be precisely similar experiences to both be good. Each has its own niche in the scale of geekery.

[Games] Steven Universe: Attack the Light (iOS)

Right around the time that my Steven Universe mania was reaching peak, several things seemed to happen. First, there was the "Steven Bomb" of episodes released in quick succession to wrap up the first season and quickly transition into the next. And just as we were getting over all the revelations related to that season-ender, Steven Universe: Attack the Light was released was released for mobile devices.

I don't keep very good tabs of games related to franchises, but it's sort of part of my partner's professional sphere of interest. So I was pretty surprised when he handed me his iPad to reveal that he had already purchased this game. Not one to say no to a Steven Universe experience, I quickly dove into the game and fell in love.

A lot of franchise games tend to be reskins of other popular games with little narrative value. This game felt different because it felt so tied into the franchise universe to a degree that few games achieve - look at great games like Doctor Who: Legacy that really embrace the fandom.

[Books] Apex

Apart from The Lives of Tao, one of the first Angry Robot Books series that I got into was the Nexus trilogy. Nexus was a rather compelling, unique book premise to begin with given the nature of the Nexus drug as a delivery system for the NexusOS - an operating system in your brain. Initially it seemed like a silly little idea, but things quickly progressed into a far more complex world and quite the epic struggle to fight for posthuman and transhuman rights.

And then I did my research and realized that the author had some serious credentials when it comes to such forward thinking, and so this was the best resource to write a book of this nature. And while to some extent all science fiction has some basis or inspiration in the present times, there's something to be said about a science type person exploring his or her ideas through fiction of this nature.

It all sort of reminds me of Alan Lightman''s Einstein's Dreams, which was an interesting exploration of various concepts of time presented as a series of dreams being experienced by Albert Einstein. It's one of my favorite books and it's sort of an inspiration to finally get around to writing creatively again.

[Movies] Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015)

Our continued adventures in the Marvel Cinematic Universe feel something like that first journey to Middle-earth when The Lord of the Rings movies were coming out year after year. And while the Marvel movies don't have quite as regular a schedule for releases, they have been steadily coming out and weaving a larger and larger tapestry of a narrative.

Avengers: Age of Ultron represents the penultimate chapter of what is known as Phase Two in the MCU timeline, with the upcoming Ant-Man movie acting as the final part of this part of the release schedule. But given how the first Avengers movie had marked the end of Phase One, it's only natural to sort of focus on this movie as the wrap-up piece and chance to look at things as a whole.

If anything, this movie was a lot of fun, but has received rather mixed reviews from different folks. The negative reactions may have been more of a result of really high expectations or something along those lines, but I feel rather strongly about how much fun this movie was and ultimately how I enjoyed it. This may be because of my excitement for Marvel's longer term plans leading up to their Infinity War movies, thus it becomes more of a fan-related feeling of satisfaction.

[Pink Culture] The One and Only Freddie Mercury

Freddie Mercury by Gabriela Rondon via Flickr.

So this past week I finally got to watch Freddie Mercury: The Great Pretender, which is a 2012 feature length documentary about the life of Freddie Mercury, particularly focused on his efforts to have a solo career. Most folks remember him as the front man for British rock band Queen. But this feature looked a little deeper into his personal life - something that has largely been rather private given Freddie Mercury's seemingly unusual shyness in contrast to her public persona.

And the whole feature got me thinking about my own love for Queen and ultimately Freddie Mercury given his tremendous contributions to music and more importantly for how his many songs just felt like they really spoke to me along with everyone else who came around to loving their music. And while Freddie Mercury may be considered a somewhat controversial figure in LGBT history because of how he handled his sexuality as perceived in the public.

But I think they really broke the mold when Freddie Mercury came to being and he certainly had some interesting and quite unique methods of personal expression that really blew the imagination away.

[Movies] Planes (2013)

As an odd follow-up to my review of Planes: Fire & Rescue, I'm finally reviewing the first movie, Planes. In my defense, I did watch the movies in order - I just didn't publish the reviews in chronological order based on my posting schedule. Hooray personal blogging quirks.

Now I was never all that much invested in the Cars universe. It's my least favorite of all the Pixar movies, and admittedly there's a bit of a distance between the next ranked movie and that one. It's just how it is.

So this movie was a little unexpected and a weird little crossover between what we know to be the Pixar side of things and the Disney side of the fence. And while Disney did acquire Pixar, they've largely remained independent in terms of their respective intellectual properties. So this movie represented an interesting effort to allow the Disney side of the how to play around in a playground created by Pixar. The resulting story wasn't entirely terribly, but it also didn't quite feel so distinct.

[TV] Adventure Time: Season 4

Now we're at the big one - Adventure Time Season 4. More than another other season of the show thus far, this one really stands out as being my favorite. And I don't think you can blame me given all the great stuff that appeared in this one season. The last season had seemed like a bit of a step backward in terms of overall quality and level of storytelling. But this fourth season brought us to entirely new places that once again changed the show as a whole.

This season also features a number of standalone episodes that really played around with the sorts of stories that Adventure Time could tell. Sure, the show has largely been episodic in nature with very few two-part events to consider. But this season really felt like it has some creative ideas for things that they wanted to try out in the show and characters that they wanted to explore at length. As much as we all love Finn and Jake, the land of Ooo is more than filled with interesting and crazy characters. And all of them deserve to have their stories told as well.

Gosh I love this season so much.

[Games] Carcassonne: The Tower

This continued exploration of the various Carcassonne expansions is turning out to be the rather fun exercise. Each expansion introduces unique new rules and remembering those rules actually in play really make for crazy fun nostalgia. What can I say? Our Carcassonne games can get pretty intense. Like really, really intense.

Carcassonne: The Tower provides a distinct new layer of player versus player rules given the rather devious Towers added to the game. When we first played the game it didn't seem all that significant, although we did appreciate the tower-shaped tile distribution figure that acts as an alternate option versus the cloth bag included in an earlier expansion.

The Tower also represents an odd little expansion that features a drastically different-sized box. The other large size expansions followed a particular box size and style. But an expansion that features a tower naturally had to be tall and narrow as well.

[Books] The Night Eternal

I read a lot of books - still not as much as I would like to, but it's a good number still. But despite my general love for books, I'm sure we've all bumped into those books that end up feeling like such a drag to read. You know what those books are like - the ones that you hoped would be interesting but instead just end up being painful to read, and thus you actually feel like you're reading them at a slower pace as time goes by. And thus it's easy to want to give up and leave the book unfinished.

Getting through the books of The Strain Trilogy has felt like that. The initial premise of the series seemed interesting enough despite some minor concerns with how the first book flowed. But then the second book happened and the problems observed in the first installment only seemed to get worse. Then this third book pretty much jumped the shark and ended up in strange territory indeed.

I think most of us who got into these books hoped to get a glimpse into the mind of Guillermo Del Toro. His movies are amazing and he clearly has quite the vivid imagination so you'd think that a book series created with his participation would have his fingerprints all over it. But instead it just felt odd and did not at all resonate with his particular artistic tone, at least not in a clear manner. And thus the series felt a little lacking in the end.

[Movies] Planes: Fire & Rescue (2014)

As a sort of spin-off of my efforts to review all the Pixar movies, I ended up following the Disney spin-offs set in the Cars universe that just happen to involve planes. Because of the quirkiness of my scheduling queue, I'm actually reviewing this sequel before the original movie - but things will resolve themselves soon enough and I'll be able to cross-link the two posts to one another.

Planes: Fire & Rescue is a direct sequel to the first 2013 movie but it still features the same character. Our lead character has quite a diverse career of sorts given he started as a crop-duster, managed to prove himself as a racer, and here tries to get into the daring world of fighting fires.

Admittedly it feels like this story was a bit of a stretch in terms of trying to use existing characters in a sequel that probably didn't need to be created, especially so quickly after the first movie. But hey, the movie already happened so we just roll with the punches and talk about what we actually watched as opposed to what we hoped to have been created in its place.

[TV] Tofu: Series 1

So apart from Cucumber and Banana, we have Tofu, the last part of the triumvirate of shows created by Russell T. Davies. Whereas the 2 prior shows are pretty much regular TV releases, Tofu is distinct given it's a companion web series for the show. And now, let's not get into the ridiculous argument where I berate the point that the medium of a show does not really define its genre. A show is a show whether online or on TV.

If you want to talk about genres, then we have to look at Tofu as a documentary series where we have various individuals expressing their opinions about various topics, a lot of which have to do with changing views of sex and things of a sexual nature.

As much as the series connects to the other shows, admittedly it's not all that compelling and feels like it sticks out a little oddly. Then again, this is a documentary series while the others are fiction-focused pieces, thus it's bound to be different. But it does have fun with itself as needed.

[Movies] The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)

By the time The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King came out in December 2003, a lot of us fans were both excited to see how things would turn out but also sad that this real-world adventure was about to end. After all, this mark three years of having some pretty geeky epic fantasy entertainment to look forward to every Christmas. And now things had come to an end.

In many ways, one can't help feel that everyone was also waiting for this final movie to fully evaluate the franchise. As much as the individual movies were pretty respectable on their own, the real measure of things was to look at the entire epic as a complete story. And it was a lot easier to look at things in this manner given how Peter Jackson had also filmed the movies in fairly quick succession.

Personally, I certainly felt a sense of fulfillment once we had gotten to the end of things. Sure, this third movie isn't necessarily the best one in the trilogy, but it at least gave things a fitting end. It got a little crazy at times and it left you with a weird feeling of things just not wanting to end, but then that's just part of the quirks of this particular fantasy franchise.

[TV] Adventure Time: Season 3

It's not easy to do season-by-season reviews for an animated series like Adventure Time given how random a lot of the episodes feel. But that's only if you look at things on the surface and over time you'll find some pretty fulfilling story concepts and plot twists woven into the overall narrative. Each individual season may not have a strong theme that ties into every episode, but you do see a steady progression of character development as each episode adds to the overall narrative framework.

At the very least, the show remains a lot of fun and each new adventure provides more opportunities for the different characters to really shine and be themselves. And I really appreciate this balance that the show manages to maintain. The overall plot and the continued development of the character stories are equally important and managing to achieve both says a lot about the creative team behind the show.

And while I don't think there were as many stand out episodes in this season, we still had a lot of fun. It had key moments, but it also had significant reveals about different characters that really affected the path of the show in future seasons.

[Games] XCOM: The Board Game

I've had a weird history with the X-COM franchise over the years. In the PC world, I've always been fascinated by the story behind the game. It's a classic science fiction concept after all - humans trying to deal with alien abductions all around the planet. The slow crawl of fighting alien UFOs, defeating alien ground troops, and salvaging their technology all made for a compelling game. The turn-based nature really drove the strategic element of the whole thing, although it had one heck of a learning curve. And the slow crawl through unexplored alien landing sites led to a lot of creepy moments. The X-COM games really created a distinct experience and I'm thankful the games were made to begin with.

When news of a board game based on the franchise came out, admittedly I was pretty excited. I wanted to see how they were going to translate the various strategic layers of the game including resource management and squad-based tactics all in a static board game. As things progressed, news that the game was going to require an app to run the different scenarios certainly upped my curiosity factor and it certainly provided new ways to make this game even more unique.

[Books] Dream Stalkers

So I wasn't quite sure what to expect from Night Terrors when it first came up in my NetGally review queue. The cover had a clown of all things and that's not something you eagerly look for. And that was probably the appropriate reaction since the cover is meant to depict a nightmare clown. And his name is Jinx.

Admittedly what had prompted me to get through Night Terrors sooner rather than later was the fact that Dream Stalkers, the follow-up novel in the Shadow Watch series was already in my review queue. And hey, a book franchise that is already able to build up into a full series feels like something that deserves more of chance than the average one-shot.

And while Night Terrors wasn't quite a home run, I was still pretty fascinating by the setting as a whole. Waggoner seems to have a good thing going here, for as long as he can provide good adventures for our pair of Shadow Watch officers to get into. And that's what this second book really represents - a test of how well these characters can continue to fare in new adventures.

[Movies] Foxcatcher (2014)

Foxcatcher was definitely one of the stranger movies to come out of the recent award season. It was one of those movies that was certainly impressive for different reasons and you know that they were out to accomplish something pretty serious here. But at the same time it felt like something a little tiring or at least a little too dark for my tastes. Then again, it's hard to wrap one's head around the fact that these events generally happened and so some of the bad stuff that happened has to be viewed through a different lens.

I'm no Channing Tatum expert, but I feel like this was probably his most serious project to date. He tends to get involved more in romance pieces or comical action movies and this was just an entirely different animal. At first I kind of hoped that this movie would somewhat lighter.

But then again, comedies do not typically make it far in the various awards competitions so I guess I shouldn't have been surprised. And the result is a movie of a different color entirely.

[TV] Banana: Series 1

Alongside Cucumber and the web documentary series Tofu, there's Banana as the other TV show created by Russell T. Davies for Channel 4. While Cucumber is a more traditional serial series with a clear character focus, Banana is something completely different. It's actually an anthology series whose mood and tone seems drastically different from episode to episode. And this is what makes it rather different.

Sure, the show remains connected to Cucumber by virtue of how many of the characters in Banana also appear in Cucumber. And we're not always talking about the primary cast. Beyond the first episode, the stories seem to be more about background characters including the guy they passed on the street or the girl you see in the background. The connection between the two shows is a cute one, but is not essential to the plots of the two shows.

Of the three shows in this block of programming, I have to admit that this surprised me the most, confused me the most but in the end it's the one that I love the most. It's such a brave, bold series and in the end it really had something powerful that it wanted to say.

[Movies] The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002)

After the success of The Fellowship of the Ring, a lot of fans of the The Lord of the Rings - whether through the books or that first movie) were eager to see what was going to happen next. And since the sequel was following the same December release schedule as the first movie, it felt like we were starting a new tradition. Sure, we only had a trilogy to look forward to back then and thus we only had two more chances to do this with our friends and family, but it was still quite the exciting time.

As while the first movie did a great job of establishing the world a and setting the scene, I'll always feel that this second movie, The Two Towers, truly represented a significant step up for the story as a whole. It's the movie that feels like a lot more fun because we had some pretty epic battle sequences and even more colorful characters.

I really, really enjoyed this second movie and it's the one I've probably watched the most out of all the different movies in this franchise. Maybe I'm just a little shallow that way or maybe I just appreciate how so much seems to happen in this chapter.

Plus we got Ents.

[TV] Adventure Time: Season 2

As much as I totally love Adventure Time, admittedly I haven't had a chance to write proper reviews of the various seasons of the show thus far. I think part of the challenge in this area is the fact that proper home video releases of the show's various seasons hadn't been released until recently. Before they had released a few episode mixes as I like to call them that provide an assortment of stories but not necessarily a whole season.

So now I'm finally going back to reviewing these older seasons since a number of DVD and Blu-Ray releases have been completed over the years. And it's a fun little exercise to go over these prior seasons again and celebrate all the interesting adventures our heroes have gotten into and all the crazier stuff we've realized lurk between the lines - or in this case the episodes.

It's never easy to explain why Tobie and I love this cartoon so much. It's a crazy series that some friends actually argue isn't good for children or something like that. But perhaps through these reviews I'll slowly piece things together one episode at time.

[Games] Carcassonne: The Princess & the Dragon

I've been looking forward to getting around to reviewing Carcassonne: The Princess & the Dragon since it's pretty much one of my favorite Carcassonne expansions. This may seem a little controversial at times and I totally understand if there are folks who don't like playing with this particular expansion added into the mix of things because the Dragon in this game is really something we tend to call "The Destroyer of Dreams."

But really, this game is great since it adds some clever new rules to the game that are more than just alternate scoring mechanics. As much as I praised Traders & Builders for doing pretty much just that, this game is a different story all together.

If anything, this game added a key mechanic that has been absent since the first version of the game - follower removal and pretty much a way for players to directly affect other players. Sure, across all prior expansions you're all still competing with one another. But it's this game that really gave you a way to make things a lot more difficult for your competitors. And that deserves some praise indeed.

[Books] The Rebirths of Tao

So the Lives of Tao books by Wesley Chu have been one of the best discoveries as my time with the Angry Robot Army book review program. On the surface this book is probably not something I would have noticed right off the bat. But since I got started on the series, I've been pretty eager to see what happens next in the great Quasing conflict on Earth.

The Rebirths of Tao is the third book in the series and perhaps the last book should this close off as a trilogy. At the very least at least Chu has announced another book series set in the same universe but following a different Quasing this time around.

But back to Tao, this book certainly escalates the entire conflict after the events of The Deaths of Tao. The Prophus was already on the losing side of their secret war with the Genjix, but now things aren't secret at all. With all of humanity now fully aware that there are aliens among them and these aliens have been pretty much manipulating humanity for thousands of years, things aren't going to get easier for either side.

[Movies] John Wick (2014)

A lot of times I worry if I look for too much from movies and TV shows. But we all look for different forms of entertainment, right? There are different things that we find entertaining and that's just human nature. It's just that a lot of times I find that I tend to expect a lot from different forms of media while the general population is happy to focus on other aspects of things.

So that brings me to today's movie review for John Wick, since I didn't exactly enjoy it and yet it seems to have gotten pretty good ratings elsewhere. And while I don't exactly blindly follow the movie reviews of others, it's not all too common for me to at least be generally in-sync with the others. This time I feel like I'm one of the outliers, should you look at things from a more statistical perspective.

And I certainly have my reasons for things - such reasons are pretty much why this blog exists. So at least it's not just some gut feel about the movie or anything like that. But still, it's a case of not being in the majority, so I guess I'll just have to live with that.

[TV] Cucumber: Series 1

I'm part of that "generation" of gay men who grew up with Queer as Folk to some extent. Whether you were more of a fan of the original UK version or the longer US version, the show had a significant impact on our social history. The show helped bring the whole LGBT life to a wider audience and demonstrated that we're more than just our sexual organs. Sure, the show had a lot of sex, but it all served the greater picture it was painting.

Cucumber is one of three shows that QAF creator Russell T. Davies has created that once again address LGBT issues. The three shows a distinct and certainly stand alone, but they also interconnect to varying degrees. It's a pretty bold concept for a network to gamble on three different productions at the same time, but I suppose you could argue we said the same thing about Peter Jackson filming the different The Lord of the Rings movies in quick succession.

Of the three shows, this one is the one that more or less follows more "traditional" TV show formats. And the story is something pretty epic in scope when you really sit down with it.

[Movies] The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)

It's a Friday, and that means digging up older movies to review in order to add them to this blog's archives. It's kind of funny whenever I encounter a movie that I liked a lot that hasn't been reviewed here, but it just goes to show how many movies one can potentially watch in a lifetime. And since this blog only began its life in 2006, there's still a heck of a lot of movies that came before that certainly deserve some "air time" here.

When The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring came out, it felt like quite the landmark movie even similar to when Star Wars was first released. It was a massive movie undertaking, especially for a genre fiction title and we had yet to see a movie of this scale for something as "silly" as a fantasy novel. And given it was the first of a full trilogy of movies, the full effects of this geeky masterpiece was not immediately apparent.

Looking back, even just how the movies were released made those Decembers feel like such a special time. The joy of having a new LOTR movie to look forward to every year was perhaps one of the hallmarks of the geeky times that we live in today.

[TV] Steven Universe: Season 1

So Steven Universe is all sorts of awesome.

As a longtime Adventure Time fan, Tobie and I had already come to love Rebecca Sugar's flair for storytelling and of course her musical talents, which helped shape the tone of Adventure Time in the early days.

The announcement that she was leaving the Adventure Time was initially a sad one, but then the follow-up revelation that she was creating an animated series of her own got us all sorts of excited all over again. We had already seen glimpses of her creative point of view within the world created by Pendleton Ward. But this time around we had a chance to hear her distinct voice in a world of her own making.

And what a world it is. Sort of taking a page from Adventure Time, we again have a strong character-driven series set in a world that is both different and yet familiar. And with each new episode with its own crazy little adventures and story, we all find out we're building up to an even greater narrative. And man, this show really blows me away every time.

[Games] The Builders: Middle Ages

The Builders: Middle Ages was quite the surprising little game that provides fairly complex gameplay in a very small package. We saw it while browsing around Paradigm Infinitum during one of our trips to Singapore last year. We weren't quite sure what to expect since typically tins this small only really support games like Timelines or something and nothing too complex.

But the tin clearly indicated on the back at this is pretty much a worker placement game, which has become one of the more compelling game systems that we've been enjoying as of late. And we're talking about big hit games like Lords of Waterdeep or even Prêt-à-Porter, both being big box games with some amazing play.

This game still manages to touch on that now-classic game mechanic and yet remaining small enough to still be brought around easily.