Spring Break Movies: The Winners

This is Day 3 in a series. You may want to check out the previous day, or start at the beginning.

Well lookie here! I actually got this one posted when I wanted to, rather than a couple of days late. Imagine that.

There aren't a lot of movies that are on this list, but the ones that are on here are absolutely fantastic. This list is The Winners of 2013.

Spring Break Movies: The Losers

This is Day 2 of a series. You may want to check out the previous day to start at the beginning.

Let me just start out by apologizing  I really wanted to get this post up on schedule, but circumstances foiled my attempt. My computer crashed yesterday, and when it restarted it got stuck in a loop that lasted for 8 iterations and a trip into my Windows 7 partition. I was seriously afraid that I had lost my computer for good, but thankfully it recovered (just not in time to still have internet access, so I lost my chance to post last night). So, here it is now.

There were a couple of movies last year that I was excited for that ended up failing to meet expectations. One of them I had waited for it to be made for years, and the other one I had seen a trailer for that made me think "oh, this looks promising." Unfortunately, they were not what they should have been. These are The Losers of 2013.

Spring Break Movies: The Ambivalent

If you've been following this blog for over a year (or if you've just looked back into the archives), I'm sure that you've noticed that I like to celebrate Spring Break by writing and posting every night of the week, with all of my posts following a common theme. I'm sure that you'll also have noticed that it is Wednesday of Spring Break and there have been no posts so far this year. I know, I'm disappointed in me too.

Basically, circumstances haven't been super conducive for writing posts this year. I currently only have an internet connection when I'm at the office during the day, so I don't usually have the ability to do research and post in the evenings when I'm free, which has been what I've done in previous years. To further complicate matters, I actually had a really cool theme picked out for this year but discovered recently that I wouldn't be finished my research in time (although hopefully I'll have it finished a little later in the year and I'll do a series then to make up). As a result, I've been scrambling to find a new topic that I can write about in the evenings (without an internet connection) and then post the next morning. So, let me present to you my thoughts on the movies I saw in 2013.

Indoor Skydiving

So, a couple of weeks ago, I had the chance to go skydiving. Inside. Weird, right? Well, it kind of was, but it was also super awesome, and a whole lot of fun.

How is it that I ended up on this excursion? It doesn't really seem like the kind of thing that I'd end up doing on my own, does it? Well, it's fairly simple: for his birthday, my friend's grandma payed for him and a friend to go do this, and I ended up being the plus one. The facility that we went to was iFly Dallas, the local site of a company that sets up these facilities all around the world. They've got sites all around America, in Australia, Singapore, the UAE, England, Russia, and a whole bunch of others. If it's something you want to check out, you can go to their website and see if there are any facilities near where you live. In any case, let's talk about my experience.

3000 Episodes Reflection: From the New World

Wow. 3000 episodes of anime. That's quite a bit of time that I've spent on my hobby in the 3.5 years since I started; if I were to watch that continuously, it would take more than 1 month, 2 weeks, and 6 days (or so says my tracker website). Now, those numbers are kind of misleading, I'll admit. Most likely I didn't really just hit the 3000 episode mark. There are some series on there that I kind of guessed how many episodes I had seen (i.e. Pokemon), but the point is it's really close, and I've spent a lot of time getting there.

Actually, interestingly enough, the 3000th episode (and 200th watched or dropped show) that I watched was the Mushi-shi special episode that just came out. You have no idea how excited I am for the second season that's starting in April. As a result, I felt like having a bit of a celebration and taking a look back at a series that I just recently finished: From the New World.

Now, this won't be a review of the series necessarily. The point of this is not to go into detail about what the show did right and what it did wrong, but rather to look at some of the points that it tried to raise and some of the messages that I think it tried to give to the viewers. This was a show that made me think about the actions of individuals and the nature of humanity itself, so that's where I'll be focusing. As a result, this post will contain some amount of SPOILERS for the show, though I'll try to keep them as minor as possible.