Sun and Moon Information: Hey, hey, they’re the Monkeys

So I pretty much totally missed the window on talking about this particular trailer, since the Daily Titan and my homework has kept me more busy than I could possibly have imagined.  Seriously, it’s a lot of work to balance all at once.  I really didn’t want to skip over talking about it entirely however, as then something new will come out in just a few days and I’ll be very, very behind.

That means it’s time to skip all this complaining about life and get straight to the monkey business.  As long as I don’t wither away from the strength of my own lousy puns first.

Build-up to Boom’s Summer 2016 Issue Forum

It’s pretty strange for me to see my own name attached to a news story that I’ve had very little or pretty much nothing to do with.

The magazine that I work for, Boom, released its prison issue not too long ago.  There’s going to be an event held on September 26 in the Fullerton Arboretum to celebrate and discuss the ideas that are inside.  A panel of speakers will be talking about prisons in California and prisoner reform for a few hours that night, and I’ll be bringing a reporter and photographer there from the Daily Titan to cover it.  I would write about it for the newspaper myself, but it could arguably be seen as a conflict of interest to write about a group that’s paying me.

The reason I bring up this event is because an article was published on the Cal State Fullerton News Center talking to the magazine’s editor Jason Sexton about the magazine and what will be happening on Monday.  While I wasn’t personally interviewed for the story that was written, I did get my picture taken along with everyone else working on the magazine at CSUF.

Granted, it took two tries on two separate days to get a proper picture done, but it wound up being a pretty sweet picture in the end if you ask me.

Check out the story here if you want, it’s a nicely done article and I think I look pretty good in the group shot, so I figured it would be worth sharing.

September 20, 2016 Article Published

This is a few days late, but I’ve had the link to this article up on WordPress for a little while now, so I figure I should still make a post.

For the issue of the Daily Titan published on Tuesday, I wrote an article about the Titan Student Union (TSU) Annual Student Art Show that opened Monday with an artists reception.  At a word count just around 1,000, it’s a real doozy of a story.  However, if you ask me, it’s a good article worthy of that kind of extended word count.

Though a chunk of the story focuses specifically on the reception itself, most of it actually covers things surrounding the show, such as the process of putting it together and the process of purchasing artwork by the Titan Student Center (TSC) Governing Board.  I talked to the TSU Gallery Coordinator and the Chair of the TSC Governing Board to try and get as much info on everything related to the show as possible.

Really, the Governing Board aspect was what made the story especially interesting to me.  Already the event was cool because of how it engages the student body with great art, whether they be artists or not, but then I learned it has a much larger significance.  The annual art show has been held for more than two decades, and each year the pieces are examined by the TSC Art Acquisition committee (now absorbed into the Programs & Services committee).  The best pieces are actually bought out by the Board and then put up all around the school.  There’s student artwork from this particular show up in the TSU, the Student Recreation Center and at the Irvine campus.

I also talked to a couple of CSUF students that had their pieces up in the show as well, giving things an interesting balance of artistic intent, event planning and bureaucratic processes.

While the story was really fun for me to write, it was also a bit of an overwhelming one in combination with other things that were going on at the time.  A thousand word story on top of running the news desk for the Titan is already a struggle, but add in more things to juggle like homework in my four classes this semester… It gets busy pretty fast.  Not that being busy is necessarily bad, as I’m in the camp that being busy is better than being bored, but I’d be lying if I said it hasn’t been a stressful couple of days.

If you want to see the story in its entirety, you can see it here.  You can also check out my whole archive of work for the Daily Titan through the link over on the right!

New Sun and Moon Trailer

Normally this kind of post would be here to talk about some new bit of information that got dropped on us out of nowhere.  In fact, given how things have been lately, it’d probably start with me complaining about how little time I have to talk about what I really like, so on and so forth.

However, this time around, the trailer we got didn’t really tell us anything new.  It just kind of showed us a few things we already knew about and barely elaborated further than what we already had.  So, this post will be nice and short, but I still thought the trailer was worth showing off and talking about for one reason in particular.

New Sun and Moon Information: Werewolves and Ultra Beasts

Once again my busy schedule has kept me from being super timely with the new CoroCoro magazine leak that happened on Monday, but that isn’t going to stop me from unnecessarily rambling on about things that make me happy and provide a good distraction from a stressful and hectic period in my life.

On that happy note, let’s talk about some Pokémon, shall we?

September 12, 2016 Article Published

Alright so the title of this post might be a little misleading.  Technically, I did have another article published for the Arts & Entertainment section of the Daily Titan this issue.  It was just published solely online, not actually in print.

This article was also a movie review rather than a look into an art exhibit on campus.  After getting to see the film early through Alt-101, a College of Communication’s program on campus, I wrote a review for Kevin Smith’s “Yoga Hosers”.

Probably the hardest part about writing this piece for me was that, ironically, I had to inject my own specific opinions into my writing.  As someone who writes hard news almost exclusively, I’m much more used to sticking to the facts and not letting my personal biases slip through.  For a review, however, it was almost entirely my personal feelings about Smith’s movie on display – even if I had to write everything in third person either way.

As a fan of some of Smith’s other flicks, including “Clerks” and “Dogma”, as well as his podcast “Hollywood Babble-On”, I was pretty much predisposed to enjoy this movie walking in.  However, as I try to articulate in the review, the same probably couldn’t be said for everyone.  It’s full of crude humor and referential jokes that only devoted fans will probably pick up on, and  I would argue that most people wouldn’t like the movie even if I did – something that Rotten Tomatoes agrees with me on.

If you want to see the review in its entirety, you can see it here.  You can also check out my whole archive of work for the Daily Titan through the link over on the right!

Finally getting that Sun and Moon hype off my chest

So obviously it’s been a while since we had the last huge batch of Pokémon Sun and Moon information drop,  and at the time that it did I was unable to talk about it due to some school commitments (particularly getting my story for one of our issues finished, an especially time-consuming thing since we’re officially on daily productions).

It’s really been killing me not to talk about this too, since there’s so much incredibly good stuff that we got to find out about in the update.  Seriously pretty game-changing kind of stuff.  With the game coming out in November I figured we were done getting really big surprise announcements, but clearly I was way off.

Even though I’m still really busy with homework and preparing for this upcoming week’s batch of newspapers, I still wanted to try and talk about Pokémon.  If nothing else, it’s a wonderful stress relief for me in an honestly very stressful time, and there’s a theory I had running through my head that I teased in the last post about this that I’ve had plenty of time to think on and really simmer down the details.

So, if you’re down to hear me ramble a bit, check out what I’ve got under the cut.  Personally I think it’s some solid stuff, even if the game could very easily come out and totally blow everything out of the water.  That’s what’s fun about a fandom though, if you ask me.  The period of time where everything is up in the air and thoughts are abound about every thing that pops up.

September 7, 2016 Article Published

Today I published my first Arts & Entertainment article of the Fall 2016 semester – if not one of the first A&E articles I’ve ever written, to be honest.

As someone who focuses almost solely on hard news, it’s rare to find me jumping around to other sections.  I do occasionally when there’s an interesting topic elsewhere, but even then I’m not usually super confident with it just because it isn’t my area of expertise.

For this story about the Tim Brooke’s “Endangered Alphabets” exhibit currently residing in the CSUF Pollak Library, however, the content was close enough to being news that I had a pretty easy time covering it.  On top of that, the exhibit is genuinely nice to visit and makes for an awesome place to sit around and relax.  As someone who enjoys having nice, quiet places to relax in, it’s a pretty great added bonus.

In fact, I’d argue that the hardest part of getting this article done was the deadline night surrounding it.  We had a huge enterprise story on the News page regarding theft on campus that’s well written but took a lot of time to finish, so we were there until at least 1:30 A.M.  Not quite as bad as four in the morning, but it’s still rough.  At least my first class of the day got cancelled due to my professor being at a conference, so there’s always a bright side somewhere.

The exhibit consists of a series of wooden slabs that have characters of languages rarely heard and even on the way to going extinct carved into them.  The carvings are split up into three sections in the gallery that each carry their own meaning.  The first “Writing as Art” section shows a series of single characters that represent a progressive change in the development of language from simple ideas to full phrases.  The second “Article One Collection” has the first article from the United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights carved out in various endangered languages.  The third “Sacred Spaces Installation” features four larger wooden panels that have a poem carved out on the wood set up in a circle, creating a space or “grove” that you can enter and experience the languages around you.

“Endangered Alphabets” will be running in the Salz-Pollak Atrium Gallery until September 23 if you happen to be in the area and want to check out the beautiful carvings before the exhibit is cycled out.

If you want to see the story in its entirety, you can see it here.  You can also check out my whole archive of work for the Daily Titan through the link over on the right!

New Sun and Moon Information: Good God so much new stuff to theorize about

Seriously, wow.  The new trailers that dropped today have so, SO much new stuff to talk about.  It’s actually ridiculous.  I’d love to be able to just sit here for a few hours and spin my growing web of plot theories and look at the new Pokémon and mechanics in greater detail… But unfortunately we started our daily Daily Titan production schedule this week, so free time isn’t something I have a lot of.

Therefore, I’m going to drop the trailers here for everyone to check out if they haven’t already, and throughout this week I’ll probably upload a couple more posts talking more intimately about what we’ve found out when I find the time to write.

I’m not joking, there’s this whole big theory I have just waiting to put out and it hurts not being able to do it yet, so stay tuned and hopefully I won’t be too late to the party.

New Sun and Moon Information: Special Z-Moves

It’s been a little while since I’ve posted anything on here, mostly because my life has been pretty nuts since school started.  Arguably I’ve given myself far too many things to do this semester despite it only being about 2 weeks in… But there’s nobody I can blame that on other than myself.  Not that I’m complaining, I do enjoy the work I’m doing despite how exhausting it tends to be.  For instance, I wanted to post up a little something regarding the death of Gene Wilder (Rest in Peace), I just didn’t have the time to devote to it that I wanted.

Anyway though, that’s not what we’ve all gathered here for today.  After all, today there was a Nintendo 3DS Direct, which means there’s plenty of video game news to discuss!  When I have a bit more time I’ll probably write something more extensive about the full direct, but for now I’ll just stick with the new Sun and Moon trailer we got, since there’s not a heck of a lot to cover.

Check out under the cut to see what’s up, or don’t if you’re somehow still keeping a strong will and avoiding any Pokémon spoilers.