Hey, so I’m really bad at titles, okay!
But anyway, here’s another blog post. I haven’t done much this week, as I mentioned last week, I’ve been kinda down with work. On the plus side, I have to add, despite some of the hard stuff, I do work with some really wonderful people. My frustration was starting to show and some of the folks I work with came to my side to ask me what they could do to help. One older volunteer even said “we’re family” and that just hit me right in the feels!
So yes, work has been tough, it continues to be, but I work with some great people and I guess I just need to get out of my own head, I need to not internalize so much and try to not take on everything myself. There are other lessons to be learned too I suppose and it is easier to say what I need to do than actually do it, but it’s a step.
So I didn’t really want to blog today, I felt like I didn’t have much to share, but then I want to keep up the one post per week momentum going. I like talking to you all about the media I consume, ( i love books, movies, games, TV) so here are 3 things I’ve been getting into this week:
1) Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (the nickelodeon series)
My niece has spent the past two weekends at the house and one of the shows we use to get her to sit down and relax for 30 minutes straight is TMNT (also My Little Ponies: Friendship is Magic). I grew up with the original TMNT so of course I was skeptical of the newer stuff… you know “kids these days! They can’t even have their own stuff, they’re recycling OUR stuff… arughrah!” But watching this series (and My Little Ponies too!) I realized, oh man, this series is (dare I say) even better than what I grew up with! It really is. The animation is slicker, the characters are more fully developed and the storylines get pretty epic. I thought, wow, this is pretty crazy, usually rehashes of old stuff tends to just produce mediocre content that bastardizes beloved franchises until it gets worse and worse. Like Star Wars. Though, if you know about the Star Wars Xmas special, that happened alot sooner for that franchise.
But I thought about it and I remembered a while back as I was scouring artist work resource websites looking for a job, I remember seeing postings about Nickelodeon looking for animators to work on this new TMNT series. These people working on this show are my age! They grew up with the characters, they care about this silly little story about fighting mutant turtles with a rat dad! And so obviously, they created a show that, in my opinion, really lives up to it’s beginnings and even surpasses the original cartoon. I’ve only seen a handful of episodes, but I genuinely enjoy watching it with the niece in a way that I just can’t with things like Mickey’s Clubhouse.
2) Classic NES games
So I went on a bit of a shopping spree in the 3ds E-shop the other day ($15 isn’t much of a “spree”, but it got me 3 games so it felt like it) and got 3 very classic NES titles: Metroid, Super Mario 3, and The Legend of Zelda.
I’ve played all three so far, spending more time with Zelda, because that game always sucks in your time somehow. It’s those dungeons, so addicting. Anyway, one thing I noticed playing these (Mario 3 being the only one I had actually played as a kid) is that these games are SUPER HARD. But not in a “this is so hard it’s discouraging and I quit way” but in a “challenging, you can do it!” sort of way. I like it. These games don’t hold your hand… at all.. they don’t even offer any real hints whatsoever (except for maybe Zelda with the old men in the caves but those are few and far in between.)
Metroid for one, took me forever to get through one area because I couldn’t figure out how to turn into a ball, then after dying, I for some reason thought… maybe I should go left at the beginning? And sure enough, there was the item i needed to turn into a ball. My impulse to go right all the time got the better of me from the very beginning!
Then with Mario 3… it’s like he’s on skates, and you only start with 5 lives (which go pretty quickly) and every time you run out of lives, you have to start from the beginning! Geez! This one is an exercise in patience.
And Zelda, that game has no mercy with the amount of monsters constantly being thrown at you and no hint as to where things like a hidden passage might be. I’ve gotten through 2 dungeons, but I think it’s just my knowledge of the Zelda formula that’s helped me get this far.
Maybe as I’ve gotten older, I appreciate feeling challenged and having to problem solve. Sure, there are games I enjoy for the simple decompression factor, like beating the crap out of people in Smash Bros., but I like stuff that makes you stop and think outside the box.
3) Youtube videos
Ah yes, Youtube, the land of crazy cat videos and cute babies that just sucks your time away. But really, if you dig a little deeper, you can find some really great channels and content that entertains, engages, and sometimes educates you! (Not to knock the crazy, silly videos, we all need a little bit of that in our lives)
Lately, I’ve been adding to my subscription list and I’ve found some great channels, from John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight channel that posts videos each week from the political satire show, to Nerdy Nummies, a cute food decorating show where a girl named Rosanna Pansino shows you how to create sweets inspired by geeky pop culture favorites, to The Fung Bros, a comedy channel where two guys talk about and deconstruct Asian American culture, or PBS Idea Channel which poses a thought provoking question using movies, television and what-have-you as a way to explain it, and one of my newer favorites Black Nerd Comedy, where Andre Meadows gives rants and raves about all things nerdy and retro (I like the nerd stuff, as you can tell). There are plenty of others, I just have been particularly enjoying these more recently and perhaps I’ll talk about some others in the future.
So there’s the 3 things I’ve been enjoying this week, what about you?
-S
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