Blog Posts



No Man’s Sky Zombie Horse Postmortem

No Man's Sky

Welcome to a stupid idea i had to pull off to start the new year. It’s outdated, irrelevant, and dumb as all hell. However, I had to do it to open the year as it had been gnawing at the back of my head for so long and 2018 is the year I start cranking out videos. I had to take the challenge, and I started it by putting up such a stupid ass video that would then motivate me to quickly bury it with more videos. It’s basically political commentary disguised as a super late postmortem review of No Man’s Sky. (more…)

Star Wars: The Last Jedi Review — Internal Conflict

Star Wars: The Last Jedi

Nowadays, it’s obvious that Star Wars has one of the most fickle fandoms in pop culture. Putting movies out over a decade after the much-maligned prequel trilogy can do that to a franchise so beloved, yet so battered by disappointments over the years. The collective love is so strong that it borders cognitive dissonance, and being able to have something to say about a new Star Wars movie is the mark of a person wanting to be seemingly in-the-know, whether they do care or not. With this review of Star Wars: The Last Jedi, I shall add to that noise. (more…)

New Hosting Yet Again and 2018 Plans

AVDR 2017

Every December, I have to deal with keeping this website up, paying for domain and hosting. I agonized on whether I should still pay for hosting or migrate this blog to Medium, and I ended up staying with hosting. However, I’ve since made some changes and put certain measures in place to secure this blog’s future as I plan to hopefully ramp things up for 2018. I’m sure I’ve done this over and over again year after year, but things really have been looking up as 2017 is about to end. (more…)

Quintet by Sakuraba — The Proleague of Grappling

Quintet

Here’s a video that just got uploaded with seemingly little to no fanfare, yet got me incredibly excited. Kazushi Sakuraba, the legendary Japanese MMA fighter, deserves a lot more mainstream attention. He’s now pushing 50, yet can’t stay away from competition. It’s granted that he hasn’t had a fight since the end of 2015, yet he’s nowhere near retired just yet. The man known as “The Gracie Hunter” and “The IQ Wrestler” has now come up with a new submission grappling event unlike any other. (more…)

The Buck Stops Here: Loot Boxes and Predatory Practices

Star Wars Battlefront II

Pardon me while this blog post is a couple of weeks late, it’s still better than never. The controversy with EA’s Star Wars Battlefront II and its loot boxes made the rounds in gaming news, even culminating in governments condemning the game and loot boxes in general as gambling. While loot boxes had become the norm in games, especially free-to-play games with not that much room for monetization, publishers had been slowly but surely pushing it as far as it’ll go until the dam breaks. (more…)

Andy Kunz Fight Night — Impromptu Juggling Act

Andy Kunz Fight Night

A week after MWF Balikbayan (late blog post on that coming soon), I had to do another ring announcing gig in the same venue. It was the Andy Kunz Fight Night, an amateur kickboxing event. I did think it was going to be a relaxing day of me just shouting out names of two guys about to beat the shit out of each other, but it turns out I had to do more things than that. In fact, particularly for this event, I had to do even more juggling than I usually do with MWF events. (more…)

On the “Coherence” of Marvel’s The Punisher

Marvel's The Punisher: Lewis Wilson

This article on The Verge about how Marvel’s The Punisher on Netflix is a mess with how it tackles gun violence in America caught my eye. Since this blog is full of cobwebs and I recently got rejected by a client for my freelance work, I’ve written something here in response, partially to remind myself that I can still write. Also, I have been watching the show. I like it, and I think I’ve seen more of it than the author of that article. (more…)

Schrodinger’s Keylogger in Chinese Mechanical Keyboard

MantisTek GK2 Mechanical Keyboard

There was this recent news of a model of mechanical keyboards made in China that turned out to have keyloggers illicitly installed in it. Of course, this is scandalous on a potentially global scale due to Chinese products becoming more ubiquitous in the tech space. It’s easy enough to assume that whatever comes out of that place is full of cooties that will make your computer cry out in pain whenever you plug it in. (more…)

Giant Robot Duel — Expected Nothing, Still Let Down

Giant Robot Duel

So, it sort of actually happened for real well over a week ago. The Giant Robot Duel that had been two years in the making finally came to pass, and it was pretty much how I expected it to be when I wrote about it here in the blog. I still watched it, much like Mayweather vs. McGregor—a circus you can’t really take your eyes away from. The only difference here is that there was something interesting enough with MayMac, while GRD was only good for memes that will die quick deaths. (more…)

The Foreigner — Skeleton of a Black Comedy [Review]

The Foreigner

If you really want a serious Jackie Chan movie that’s actually good, watch Shinjuku Incident. Otherwise, this film isn’t that surprising for him at this stage in his career. He has always done action-comedy hybrids, so of course he would want to take some detours as he gets older and his body becomes less resilient to the wear and tear he has put himself through over his career. In any case, at first glance, I see The Foreigner like it’s Taken on Prozac. (more…)

Oxhorn — Telling the Stories of the Fallout Franchise

Oxhorn

There are a number of YouTube channels out there focused on either a specific game, franchise, publisher, or genre. I call them “game coverage channels,” which are great for those with more specific tastes in games. In this case, Oxhorn is a Fallout channel, which already makes it interesting for a CRPG fan like me. However, what makes this one stand out among its counterparts is its sheer quality. (more…)

Geek Day 2017 — Still an Okay Time, I Guess

Geek Day

A week after vlogging Cosplay Mania 2017, I felt confident enough to do more event coverage. It just so happened there was indeed another one the following week in SMX. Geek Day 2017 was a smaller and more intimate event, focused on things I’m more into. On paper, that seemed like a good way for me to make up for not vlogging AsiaPop Comicon. While I did take a bit longer to finish than Cosplay Mania 2017 due to work and procrastination, I did learn a few things on how to cover events I didn’t plan in advance to attend. (more…)