It's been quite awhile since I last updated you guys on my work for the Rotoscopers, so here is everything I've written there from the end of May through December! In the future, I think I'm going to try to do one of these updates every six months. We'll see if I remember. :)
Studio Ghibli Countdown: When Marnie Was There
Steven Universe: Season 5 Premiere Trailer Released Online
Obituary for Peter Sallis
Star Wars Rebels: Season Two Blu-ray Review
Obituary for June Foray.
DuckTales: Season Premiere Review
Star Wars Rebels: Season Three Blu-Ray Review
Star Wars Rebels: Season Four Trailer announcement
DreamWorks Animation Countdown: Chicken Run
Lego Ninjago: Movie Review
DreamWorks Animation Countdown: Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit
DreamWorks Animation Countdown: Flushed Away
Samurai Jack Season 5: DVD Review
Halloween Countdown: Gravity Falls: Summerween
World of Tomorrow: Episode 2: Trailer Released Online
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales: Blu-Ray Review
I contributed a review to a roundtable discussion of The Breadwinner.
An non-review article I wrote about the The Breadwinner.
Despicable Me 3: Blu-Ray Review
Star Wars Rebels: Season 4 Part 1: Roundtable Review
Birdboy: The Forgotten Children: Roundtable Review
The Big Bad Fox and Other Tales: Roundtable Review
Sunday, December 31, 2017
Monday, December 25, 2017
This Christmas Online (2017)
This is basically a last month online post, but with only Christmas videos. So I did the only logical thing and made an entirely new logo for it.
I will warn you in advance, that this is going to be another rather long post. I follow a lot of artists, and quite a few of them decided to release Christmas albums this year, (Or deluxe versions of last years' albums) so there was a lot of new music! I've tried to whittle it down to only my favorites, but, you know, I can only whittle things down so far... :p
We'll start with a Lindsey Stirling one, because she started early. Like, in October.
But then, so did Pentatonix.
It's still sad to see them without Avi, but they're still as good as ever.
And of course Peter Hollens did a bunch of new music as well.
As did the Piano Guys.
And Taylor Davis
And Voctave
Even Sia released a Christmas album! I absolutely loved this video, and it might actually be my favorite video this year. I was not expecting that many cameos, and I just loved that it featured Kristen Bell and Dax Shepard. :) The only thing that could have made it better would have been to have Kristen actually singing with Sia, instead of just lip-synching to her vocals. Oh well, I loved it anyway. :)
I don't normally care much about Hollywood marriages, but there's just something about Kristen and Dax that I love. :) Side note, wouldn't he be perfect for a Mr. Rogers bio-pic? Just look at him in that cardigan! They're practically twins! :p
I will warn you in advance, that this is going to be another rather long post. I follow a lot of artists, and quite a few of them decided to release Christmas albums this year, (Or deluxe versions of last years' albums) so there was a lot of new music! I've tried to whittle it down to only my favorites, but, you know, I can only whittle things down so far... :p
We'll start with a Lindsey Stirling one, because she started early. Like, in October.
But then, so did Pentatonix.
It's still sad to see them without Avi, but they're still as good as ever.
And of course Peter Hollens did a bunch of new music as well.
As did the Piano Guys.
And Taylor Davis
And Voctave
Even Sia released a Christmas album! I absolutely loved this video, and it might actually be my favorite video this year. I was not expecting that many cameos, and I just loved that it featured Kristen Bell and Dax Shepard. :) The only thing that could have made it better would have been to have Kristen actually singing with Sia, instead of just lip-synching to her vocals. Oh well, I loved it anyway. :)
I don't normally care much about Hollywood marriages, but there's just something about Kristen and Dax that I love. :) Side note, wouldn't he be perfect for a Mr. Rogers bio-pic? Just look at him in that cardigan! They're practically twins! :p
Blimey Cow recently put out a Christmas themed video with some of my favorite brand of satire. :p I especially loved that they were picking apart of that awful "Christmas Shoes" song, and I about died laughing at the "Happy Holidays" segment. Sadly, I know too many people like that.
Let's do another Lindsey Stirling one, because I have several of those to share. I may even save the least Christmas related one for the next Last Month Online post, because I just have so many.
And another Peter Hollens
Another Piano Guys.
Walk Off the Earth did a great version of Deck the Halls! I love the creative, different ways they do all their videos! How cool would it have been to randomly be on that plane with them!
Nick Pitera recently put out a Christmas EP, and I just loved this song he did with Susan Egan.
And Mike Tompkins did a great Home Alone Medley.
Studio C has put out a few Christmas skits this month, but this one about killed me. XD
The "Missionaries" scene is even funnier when you remember that the Studio C team are Mormon themselves. I love that they keep a sense of humor about things like that. :)
Lets do one more Pentatonix before we close this. This was one of my favorites of all these Christmas songs. It's still sad that Avi has left the group, but they seem to have found a great replacement. I'm looking forward to hearing what else they do with him.
And we'll close the way we opened, with a Lindsey Stirling song. One of my favorite Christmas songs, and I love her spin on it. :)
Saturday, December 23, 2017
Overheard 3
Well, it's been a long time, a year and a half to be exact, but I am back with another post of overheard conversations! In case you don't remember, or missed the other two times I did one of these, all of these anecdotes are real conversations that I personally overheard and then wrote down to share later. Some days it pays to blend into the background. You never know what kind of weirdness people will say when they think no one is listening! Or when they don't care. Either way can be funny.
If you're curious, the previous two posts can be found HERE and HERE.
I've been collecting these since I did the last post, so I have quite a few new ones to share!
The most obvious place for me to overhear things is at work. Some customers will say anything, not paying attention to anyone around them. It's like they think we're a part of the store and not autonomous humans that can listen to everything they're saying. I suppose I should be insulted, but as long as they're not rude to me personally, and I get a story out of it, I'm kind of okay with being ignored. :p
A grandmotherly-aged woman was talking to her husband while looking at her phone as they came through my checkout line.
"I got a text from Dylan and he said his friend Jayden said 'Your grandparents are dope!' So I texted back and told him I was sorry we were dopey. And he just replied and he said, 'No grandma, being dope is good!' So I guess things have changed. Back in the day calling someone a dope was an insult!"Earlier this year we had a total solar eclipse pass over our part of the country, and I heard a lot of people talking about it the day after. This was by far the weirdest one. It was from an old man, if that makes any difference.
“Well, I didn’t turn into a werewolf in the holocaust!”In the holocaust. The HOLOCAUST. Just let that one sink in for a moment. No one corrected him, and he seemed completely unaware of what he had just said.
Another day, a mother was buying several boxes of macaroni and cheese, and as she unloaded her cart she said,
"My toddler just loves to eat the cheese dust out of the macaroni and cheese boxes. He calls it 'Shake shake.'"Initially I laughed, and then I realized that, as she was buying quite a lot mac&cheese, she must have no problem with feeding her toddler copious amounts of processed chemical cheese dust, on a regular enough basis that he has given this 'snack' his own name, and I wasn't sure if I found it so funny anymore.
If you've shopped anywhere within the last six months, you've probably noticed that the credit cards with the chips are becoming more and more common. Unfortunately my store does not have the best chip readers, so it can take anywhere from 5 to 15 seconds longer than a normal swipe reader for the transaction to process. For some people this is an inconvenience of the highest caliber, about which they must loudly and rudely proclaim their anger and frustrations over. Those customers' stories I will not share here, though I may eventually end up killing one or two off, in my other series of work-related stories, Twist Endings, but once in awhile I will get one of the sainted few who decide to make a joke of the *extremely minor* inconvenience of the chip readers. Case in point, the elderly woman who couldn't quite figure out what to do with her new card right away.
"Oh dear. I’m never going to live long enough to remember this."Across the store one day I heard a whole bunch or racket so I looked toward the pet aisle, and I saw three little girls incessantly squeaking everything in a display of dog toys. Suddenly their mother appeared behind them and exclaimed,
“Unless you have 4 legs and a tail, put those down!”Speaking of kids, the single most common type of overheard conversation comes from them. I have so many of these. They're all wildly different, and they're all hilarious.
Last year there was a new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie released, and as with most new blockbuster films, we got a big cardboard display to set up in the store when the DVDs were released. Not long after the stand had been set up, a little girl with a very fit dad came through my line. By 'very fit' I mean that the dad was wearing a tight t-shirt and he had noticeably bulging muscles.
The little girl was probably around two or three, and as I rang up their groceries, the little girl was looking at the movie display. It's worth pointing out that these new Ninja Turtles are a bit more humanoid than the cartoony versions from the 80's and 90's, but they're still buff, green turtle monsters. The girl was studying them for awhile, and then turned to her dad, pointing at the display.
"Look! Daddy! Daddy, it’s you!"The dad turned to look at what she was talking about, saw the muscular turtle-men, and quipped:
"Oh, thanks sweetie! Not sure how I feel about that..."Another day a mother and child came through my line.
Child: "Mom! Mom! Can I have some chapstick?"Last year, one of the biggest online trends was the 'Bean Boozled Challenge.' The candy company, Jelly Belly, makes a game(?) where they package a bunch of different random flavors of jelly bean, with identical jelly beans of awful flavors. For example, the light green jelly beans might be lime, but they might also be boogers. For awhile, every other YouTuber was buying these jelly beans, and then they'd get together with a friend, and make a video, documenting their outrageous reactions to eating terrible flavors, like Skunk Spray, or Stinky Socks. And for some reason, this made these jelly beans insanely popular, and we were selling a lot of them. This was the funniest conversation around them that I heard during the craze, between a little girl and her mother.
Mom: "No, you don't need it!"
Child: "But mom! My chips are chapped!"
Mom: "Your chips are chapped?"
Child: "Mom! No!! My lips!!"
Little Girl: "Mom! This one has dead fish! And rotten eggs!”It's not always little kids, I've overheard some teenagers too. Like this one, where a group of boys came in to buy a bunch of Mexican sodas, which come in glass bottles. One set his bottles on the counter and turned to his friends.
The Mom, feigning interest: "Oh!"
Little girl, very excitedly: “Last time I only got one bad one, and my brother got all the bad ones!"
She opened the package: “Mom! I found a barf one! And boogers! I don’t like those. Lawn clippings is okay though, right mommy? "
Mom, as they left the store: “Well…”
Girl, interrupting: “There’s coconut! That’s a good one! But not baby wipes!”
Little girl, from far away: “I’m so excited!!!"
“These bottles make great hammers! I used one of mine to pound in a tent stake!”Okay kid, good luck with that.
Another time I overheard two younger teenage boys, discussing problems at school, culminating with one declaring everything he was going to do to fix it, 'Once he became president.' The other one replied,
"Yeah, well, when you're president, you're not going to care about middle school issues anymore."Another place that I got a lot of great overheard material from this past year was at college. I'm out of school now, so that well has kind of dried up, but I collected a lot while I was there, especially from one class in particular. I had one teacher who was always coming up with something funny to say, and as this was a creative writing class, so were all the students. Here are some of those exchanges.
One of the first days, the teacher was trying to get to know the students.
Teacher: "What's your job?"The teacher was talking to a student during role call.
Student: "I'm a dog groomer."
Teacher: "Well you must be good at it because you don't have any chomp marks."
Teacher: "So what did you do this weekend?"During another role call:
Student: "I picked up my boyfriend from the airport. He was studying abroad in England."
Teacher: "Oh, that's exciting! Did you link pinkies all the way home?"
Student: "No..."
Teacher: "Oh... Well I would have."
Teacher: "Michael. Do you prefer Mike or Michael?"A student was talking about a guy he had seen, during an exercise where we were to observe a stranger for awhile and notice things about them that would be worth writing about if they were a fictional character.
Michael: "How about Mike when you're talking to me, and Michael when you're talking about me."
Student: "He was playing a game on his phone."The teacher also had some very random quips during conversations and lessons that just struck me as hilarious.
Teacher:"What was he playing? Tetris? Farmville?"
A different student chiming in: "Well hello Mr. 2005. Did you know there's going to be a black president in three years?"
Teacher: "I have heard such things, yes."
"It's not a good idea to eat lentils before a three mile race through the woods."
"I think she was an animal science major, because something just seemed, like, animal science-y about her."
"Did you ever play with paper dolls? You seem like someone who liked to color and snip."This next one was from a completely different class, one that was optional for me, this class had the same teacher as the one I'd just finished, both advertising classes, and the teacher had invited my class to sit in for the guest speaker in his next class. There were two girls near me from that class, for whom the class was not optional, having a public, private conversation before the guest arrived
Student 1: "What even is this?"This next one was just a random student I heard, I don't think he was in any of my classes, I think he was talking about a test he had to take, and it may actually have been in Sunday school at my grandma's church.
Student 2: "This girl's coming in to talk about being a copywriter."
Student 1: "What even is that?"
Student 2: "A copywriter?"
Student 1: "Yeah."
Student 2: "They like, write all the copy. In ads."
Student 1: "Ooohhhhhhh... Do we even have to be here?"
"You know that song by 'Bohemian Rhapsody'? Like, "I'm just a poor boy, nobody loves me," that's how I feel right now."I mean, I've only ever heard a handful of songs by Queen, but even I know that it's the SONG that's called Bohemian Rhapsody.
One of my favorite classes in my last year of school was my poetry class, which was largely due to the teacher. She was just such a great person to be around, always friendly, always talking about random things that had happened in her life. Since she was a poet, this makes sense, as she mined her life experiences for poetry ideas. She also like to give life advice, such as this little gem, from her first marriage during her time in a traveling rock band.
"You should never marry your heavy metal guitar player. Just a little life advice for you guys."Well, I think that's going to be all for this post. I actually still have more than this, I didn't really even touch on most of what I've overheard at church, but I think I'll save that for next time. Hopefully I'll get to the next one sooner than I did for this one. :p
Saturday, December 16, 2017
#TrueFacts 28
Did you know that most species of snowmen went extinct during the last ice age? #TrueFact
Did you know that Burrowing Mime Weasels are vegan? Well, except for Chad over there. But really, is it his fault that chickens are so delicious? I feel like the chickens deserve at least some of the responsibility here. That henhouse was just asking to be raided in the middle of the night. #TrueFact
Did you know that corks are considered legal tender in rural Kentucky? It costs 15 corks and a corncob to buy one fresh possum. #TrueFact
Did you know that fishcakes taste way better with tomato gravy on them? Or was it way worse? I can never remember. #TrueFact
Did you know that the lady who invented the poncho did so because she couldn't figure out how to sew in a zipper? #TrueFact
Did you know that Triscuit crackers are made from compressed bales of dried alfalfa hay? #TrueFact
Did you know that ipecac syrup is made from honeydew and cantaloupe? They really are nature's perfect little vomit inducers. #TrueFact
Did you know that chess is the 3D version of checkers? #TrueFact
Did you know that before settling on "Banjo" as the name for his spiffy new musical invention, Cletus McMulletson wanted to name his revolutionary new instrument the "Honkenplinker"? #TrueFact
Tuesday, December 5, 2017
Last Month Online (November 2017)
I have a LOT more videos than usual this month, so let's just jump right into them!
Biggest news of the month: OK Go is back!!! MY jaw dropped to the floor and stayed there through the whole video. I am in absolute awe of their creativity. This would be an amazing video if they had shot on green screen and built all the effects with CGI and animation, but the fact that this is all practical effects, created with PRINTERS, and more specifically, PRECISELY TIMED printers, is just utterly astounding.
And speaking of people being back! Owl City is back! The first music video for his upcoming album dropped this month, and I love it! :D
Superfruit (Scott and Mitch of Pentatonix) have been putting out some extremely catchy music recently, but this video is one of my favorites. It has just the right amount of weird, random, creative catchiness. My favorite part is definitely the old granny mannequin/morph-suit person. :p
And speaking of Pentatonix, they have bumped up their content in the last couple of months, however most of it is Christmas music, which I am saving for a Christmas post later this month. This one, even though it is used as a Christmas song, is not traditionally a Christmas song, so I decided to include it here, and save the others.
I've never seen Steven King's It, and I don't really plan to, but this parody, starring everyone's least favorite Star Wars character, Jar Jar Binks, just absolutely cracked me up.
I don't think I've featured Alex Boyé in awhile, let's remedy that with his epic new cover of Imagine Dragons' Believer!
I. Love. Melodysheep.
I honestly never thought I'd feature this song on my blog. It was everywhere this summer, and I was kind of sick of hearing it, but leave it to Kurt Hugo Schneider, Sam Tsui, & co to come up with a version I really liked. :)
I'm sure you've never heard of Adler Davidson, he's a very small YouTuber, but he deserves to be bigger. I absolutely loved this video he put out, I've played it on repeat so many times. He is such a weird, hilarious genius.
Side note: I've actually had a customer get wildly, and furiously, offended at me for saying, "Have a nice day," before, because "It's none of you business what kind of a day I have." So that part actually made me laugh for more than just that it sounds ridiculous. It may be ridiculous, but it's also true. I don't know if that's hilarious or sad. Maybe both.
This is probably the least weird video that Poppy has ever made. But I still loved it for the song, despite the video's relative normality. It still had a semi-creepy face-less mop creature playing an electric guitar, so at least it had a little something extra there for me. :p
This extremely short video showed up online out of nowhere this month, and I fell in love. I've lost count how many times I've watched it and showed it to people. Who knew that a spider could be so adorable!?
This was originally an animation test by an independent animator, starring his nephew Lucas as Lucas the spider, but he has since rebranded the channel around the character and made another short! I hope he keeps going! I need a steady supply of Lucas in my life!
I already loved this song by Selena Gomez and Marshmello, but as usual, I think I like Mike Tompkins' version better.
I will never not be utterly amazed by World Order's (Dancing? Acrobatic? Choreography?) skills.
We'll end this post with another hilarious Studio C sketch. I never watch Saved By the Bell as a kid, but I loved this sketch. It perfectly captured the cheese of the era, and added heaping helping of Studio C's hilarious brand of brilliant weirdness.
Tags:
Adler Davidson,
Alex Boye,
Kurt Hugo Schneider,
Lucas the Spider,
Melodysheep,
Mike Tompkins,
OK Go,
Owl City,
Pentatonix,
Poppy,
Sam Tsui,
Spiders,
Studio C,
Superfruit,
The Wizard of Oz,
World Order
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