Got a fun one for everybody today. None of this dreary breaking news or government business.
No.
Today we’ve got Kirby.
This past weekend was a fun one between getting Star Allies for the Switch and going to see Hollywood Babble-On with my dad. It didn’t exactly help my exhaustion levels, but that’s what Spring Break is probably going to be for next week.
So long as I don’t abuse the freedom by not sleeping ever…
But that’s beside the point. Unless of course that lack of sleeping comes as a result of playing more Kirby. Which is a very strong possibility.
I’ve been having a great time playing the game thus far, as it is frankly difficult to not have a good time playing a Kirby game. That’s one of the main points I hit in the review I wrote for the Daily Titan today.
One of the other points, unfortunately, was the fact that the game strikes me as being so easy and quick-to-beat that it may not be worth the pricy $60 investment for some.
It will be worth the investment for me personally thanks to my obsessive desire to collect every puzzle piece, beat the time trial and arena modes with each character type and ultimately achieve a 100 percent completion rating. Plus, the game will undoubtedly make for a fun multiplayer experience with my friends over the break and going into the near future.
I won’t go super into detail about my thoughts and opinions on Kirby in this blog post because I do delve into it more succinctly in my review.
On top of that, I’m also planning on possibly publishing a separate “Director’s Cut” review here in the future. Either that or a post I’m imagining describing how the game goes wrong for my tastes.
But for those, we’ll just have to see what time allows.
For now, if you want to read my review in its entirety, you can check it out here. I’m always excited to get to meld my passions together after all!
You can also see my full archive of work for the Daily Titan over on the right.
Editor’s Note: For anyone who may be confused seeing this style of review show up here, let me explain. This article was one I had originally written for the Daily Titan’s first spring 2018 issue. Though the movie had its official wide release on Jan. 12 and we find ourselves in the midst of Oscar season, it was decided a review of this particular flick wouldn’t be timely enough to go in print by the time we hit production.
But of course, as luck would have it, I had finished writing the article before finding out it wasn’t running.
So I decided to cannibalize my own work and put it out on my personal blog with some additional bits added on. After all, what would be the point of having a blog for my writing if I didn’t do that sort of thing, and what better time is there to share something like this than the day Oscar nominations have been announced? It is a best picture nominee after all, amongst other things.
Plus I figured this movie in particular fit the theme of my blog given that it surrounds an important part of journalism history.
That said, I’ll stop blabbing and let you get to my opinions. If you enjoy this sort of thing let me know, since I have been considering doing this kind of personal publishing more often.
In 1971, a series of classified documents known as The Pentagon Papers were leaked to and published by The New York Times, revealing multiple presidential opinions on the futility of the Vietnam War despite its escalation.
When the government attempted to censor this sensitive information publishing, other papers like The Washington Post stepped in to continue the job.
Steven Spielberg’s latest movie “The Post” captures this important period in American and journalistic history that brought The Washington Post to mainstream popularity while offering viewers a more intimate, behind-the-scenes glimpse at the paper’s struggle with deciding whether or not to publish The Pentagon Papers.
This struggle is chiefly characterized by the film’s two lead characters, The Washington Post’s publisher Katherine “Kay” Graham (Meryl Streep) and editor Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks).
Throughout the movie Graham must come to terms with being the first female publisher of a major newspaper after she inherits the business from her deceased husband.
Her inner turmoil comes from having to make the decision to potentially betray old family friends in the White House’s previous administrations so the public can learn the truth, while subsequently dealing with the “boy’s club” of publishers and investors who don’t believe a woman has what it takes to handle the job.
Meanwhile, Bradlee has to deal with the humiliation of losing such a huge scoop to The New York Times despite being the editor of Washington D.C.’s local paper, as well as the immense amount of work it takes for his team to secure a copy of the documents and go to print in a limited timeframe.
Eventually Bradlee also must come to terms with the fact that the potential illegality of publishing classified government documents may backfire on his longtime ally and friend Graham, who has much more at stake and much more to lose.
One of the standout means of building tension in the film comes from the way it showcases the more limited technologies available in the 1970s that led to more of an involved newsprint production process.
For example, one scene that comes to mind has a copy editor asked to do all of his red pen corrections on a physical printout of the major article in 30 minutes before sending it off in a pneumatic tube to be laid out on a more traditional printing press.
However, as interesting as it is to see the time period captured, where “The Post” truly shines is in its performances. It is hard to compare Hank’s depiction of Bradlee to the classic 1976 performance of Jason Robards in “All the President’s Men,” but Hanks does hold his own as a leading actor.
However, Hank’s performance is clearly overshadowed by Streep, who does an incredible job capturing the internal debate and eventual paradigm shift of Graham to support her staff and the First Amendment in spite of what the government would prefer.
Her arc is also given some clear signposts throughout the movie to show her role as a historically significant feminine figure, which Streep nails in facial expressions alone in scenes like her emergence from the Supreme Court toward the end of the story. In that moment she seems to ignore the primarily male-dominated crowd of journalists to instead focus on the passing businesswomen who have stopped to watch the commotion.
While Streep’s performance is undoubtedly the takeaway Oscar-nomination in “The Post” (and as it turns out, she did get nominated for it), there is hardly anything bad to say about the surrounding ensemble of characters either.
Unfortunately, performances are really the only place that “The Post” stands out. Despite having the legendary team of Spielberg as director and John Williams as composer, nothing about the presentation is necessarily exceptional.
The movie looks nice and sounds nice, is well-cast and well-written, but one would be hard pressed to walk out of the theatre after watching it and remember a particular image or score from the experience as something special that stays with them.
Even with this caveat, the performances and socio-historical importance backing up the movie make it undoubtedly worth seeing.
In an era begot by cries of “fake news” and the divisive presidency of Donald Trump, it is especially important to see this story come to the table in such a high-profile form to remind the world about the importance both of newspapers as a government watchdog and of the public staying informed with a higher degree of news literacy.
On top of that, “The Post” also fits in wonderfully with the strong legacy of journalism-based films.
Because of the way Spielberg uses the same Washington Post office set piece and ends the movie on a sort of cliffhanger teasing the start of the Watergate scandal, “The Post” and “All the President’s Men” could literally be watched in seamless succession to give anyone who did or did not live through the 1970s a clear understanding of the importance of newspapers, particularly The Washington Post, in American history.
I’m sure I’ve said this before, but it’s very rare that I get the pleasure of seeing my two passions – video games and journalism – meld so nicely together at this stage in my career.
So I really enjoy the times that they do come together, like with this review I wrote about the Mario & Luigi Superstar Saga remake.
After a couple of long, rough weeks dealing with a mass shooting and some crazy local fires, it’s been a blessing to have a game to unwind with recently, particularly a game that holds such a strong place in my heart.
Seriously, re-experiencing Superstar Saga has been an absolute joy, even if the whole time I feel like I’ve been focused more on deeply examining what’s different, both the good and the bad changes. That kind of critical eye did make it easier to pull things apart for a review, but it has certainly made the actual act of playing a whole different animal for me.
Oh, and pull things apart I did, as I focused this review much more on how things differ compared to the original game than I did on the game itself, since I figure that’s what should be done for something like the review of a remake.
While I did have a great time with Superstar Saga (and I’m not quite done yet – I’ve beaten the main story but I haven’t yet finished collecting everything 100 percent, and I’m still working my way through Bowser’s Minions), it isn’t perfect by any means. It is vastly improved upon compared to the original in almost every way imaginable, but there is a lot that feels like a backpedaling as well.
I try to address some of those points in my review, but the chief complaint I had with the game really boils down to the battle system. Compared to the original game, this remake has gorgeous sprite work that lends itself to really complex and over-the-top character animations, which are nice but make each action feel longer. On top of that, the battles are easier than I remember them being (much like the rest of the game in all honesty) and the music contributes to slogging battles down and making them grow to tedium faster by sounding far slower, seeming more eclectic within itself and has more synthetic tones.
If that makes sense. I’m not much of a music reviewer, but that feels right in my head.
Despite this issue, the game is still hilarious, beautiful and sounds great by all other accounts, and I’d highly recommend picking it up if you have experienced the story or if you haven’t before. It’s just too bad that the system you spend 90 percent of your time experiencing is arguably the worst part.
Oh, and when I say the game feels way easier than I remember, I’d say take the comment with a grain of salt. There are a lot of gameplay functionalities which have been vastly improved upon to streamline aspects of the experience, and those improvements do make the overall experience seem easier… But at the same time I also had the entirety of this game memorized like the back of my hand before walking in, so it might not be that much ‘easier’ for someone who’s never heard of the game before.
Plus the endgame still has a big difficulty spike when going through Bowser’s Castle in my opinion, so there’s always that.
Either way I certainly don’t mind an easy game here or there, if nothing else that ease helped this be a wonderful stress relief and trip down memory lane for me.
Unfortunately, I didn’t want to burden my editor Sarah with too much in regards to putting this article together (even though the 900 words I have can already easily be considered overkill), so much of what I wrote out in my drafting process got left on the cutting room floor.
Luckily this blog seems like the perfect place to rectify that. So, if I have the time, expect a more complete unabridged version of my thoughts on Superstar Saga + Bowser’s Minions sometime here in the near future. It’ll be long, it’ll be hella involved, but that’s the magic of a personal blog. It offers you a place to shout your endless opinions into the void.
At least, that’s how I like to use it anyway.
If you want to see my article in it’s entirety (the theatrical release version at least, as I like to put it), you can see it here. You can also see my full catalog of articles for the Daily Titan over on the right!
Turns out, the game review wasn’t the only thing I wound up getting published today. It was going to be, but then we decided to run an update on the Anaheim Hills Fire, and I got slated to work on that.
So, since I already had the entire gaming part written up early (shows me for trying to be ahead I suppose), I figured it’d be worth adding this portion to the bottom here.
I don’t really have a lot to say necessarily, this story was more of a straight-forward deal. I pulled together some tweets from the Anaheim Fire & Rescue department that gave the most recent updates on containment of the blaze, as well as some information from the California Department of Transportation talking about a local highway that was partially reopened on Friday.
Then, once I had those basics down, I got in touch with the Orange County Fire Authority, where I was directed to the Public Information Officer for the Canyon 2 Fire, Mike Yeun. The guy was real nice, more than willing to chat even while he was driving, and he gave me a bunch of good information to fill out my story. It definitely made things much stronger than the basic 200 word short update I had before.
For anyone curious, the fire was 75 percent contained as of 7 p.m. on Oct. 14, and authorities are expecting full containment by Oct. 17. Things are well on their way thanks to the effort of apparently over 1,600 firefighters at one point at least.
If you want to see that article in it’s entirety, you can check it out here. Or, once again, everything I’ve written for the Titan is over on the right, so you can check that out too if you want.
You may think I’m strange for celebrating the six-month anniversary of a mobile game, but I can assure you that I haven’t been obsessivly counting down the days since release. I’m just jumping on the celebration boat Intelligent Systems has set afloat!
After all, if Duel Links and Fire Emblem Heroes have taught me anything, it’s that mobile games apparently really enjoy celebrating half a year’s worth of existing.
It’s strange to think that this game is already half a year old. To be completely honest, I’m not sure whether or not that seems like a long time ago or not long ago at all. The last semester of school I endured was such a slog for a variety of reasons that I feel like things changed completely between the beginning of Spring 2017 and now.
Yet, I can still distinctly remember the day when Fire Emblem Heroes dropped as if it were yesterday. I remember riding down one of the elevators in the College Park building on campus with (I believe) my friend Megan there next to me, trying out a game that had just been announced not long prior, one that I was very excited for in the midst of still playing Pokémon Moon. The classic music and game art was so refreshing for a mobile game that I instantly fell in love.
Then I remember sitting in front of a classroom in the basement of the Education building waiting for my honors history class with Professor Hall to begin while writing an awfully long-winded and ridiculously in-depth review of a mobile game to be published in the school paper. One which eventually my buddy Kaleb had to help me cut the hell down because seriously who wants to read that much about a dumb mobile game except me?
Hell, even in this small niche I’m trying to carve out for myself I’m not totally convinced anyone wants to read my long-winded speeches about this game. I certainly never expected Fire Emblem Heroes to blossom into being the biggest thing I talk about into this void I call my blog after that initial review I wrote, but here we are. I suppose the game is just a gift that keeps on giving.
Hopefully the new Arts & Entertainment editor for the Daily Titan will be as accepting of stupidly intimate game reviews as Kaleb was…
That’s probably more than enough waxing poetic for one day. I was the one who made a joke about celebrating a six-month anniversary at the beginning of this post, after all. Now here I am talking endlessly about fond memories for a game only six months old.
Though I suppose I can appreciate the overall sentiment of celebrating this. In a time where we’re constantly barraged by stimuli of all kinds and live through an interconnected virtual web that has the memory of a fruit fly, any new venture that manages to last six months without really losing a hefty degree of zeal from its fan base certainly seems like something to celebrate.
ESPECIALLY in the field of free-to-play mobile games. I’m sure most of those things die off fast from frustrating their core player base alone.
Plus, it’s not like I can complain about a celebration. The game is planning to celebrate their anniversary with free goods, after all!
Give me all of your orbs, Feh…
The most important thing going on for the game’s six-month anniversary, I’d argue, is the big orb dump. The game will be providing two log-in bonus events that provide players 20 orbs if they log in ten times over two week periods. One starts today and goes until the 21st, while the other starts the 22nd and will go until September 10th.
40 orbs? Not a bad deal, Nintendo. I can respect that.
As I’ve expressed plenty of times in the past, one of my biggest idiosyncrasies when it comes to Fire Emblem Heroes is a strange peace of mind and security that comes with hoarding a large quantity of orbs just in case a certain hero arrives that I desperately need in my (probably somewhat pathetic realistically speaking) virtual life.
My last hoarding session was cut off somewhat pre-maturely by the arrival of the second summer heroes banner, but since I managed to summon summer Elise:
Perhaps the Loli bait is strong with this one, but she’s grown on me. Something in the way her face is drawn is just way too cute.
I’ve been pretty good about saving up again. Sorry Xander, as much as I love your Lilith floatation device, I gotta start saving up again. Plus most of the tier lists say Elise is better anyway. So there.
Speaking of summer heroes, this six-month anniversary celebration began the day after our last Voting Gauntlet ended. I don’t have a lot to say about it, but I felt it was worth bringing up, so this seemed like a good transition.
Overall I did pretty poorly.
I lost the first two rounds when backing my girl Elise against Corrin before joining my friends to back Robin against Corrin, but she steamrolled me both times. Then I supported Corrin in the final round and…
Naturally we destroyed Gaius, who is ironically my favorite guy from the first summer summoning banner. Funny how that works.
These Voting Gauntlets don’t tend to mean much outside of getting some extra feathers, however, so really that’s about all I have to say on the matter. Except for the fact that they added some extra orb rewards on each cycle of the rounds, which was a much appreciated addition.
Keep that up I’d say. It definitely encouraged me to participate in the event more often.
Getting back into the meat and potatoes of this post, the six-month anniversary celebration isn’t just a couple of orb showers.
Though they haven’t arrived yet, part of the celebration will include two limited edition special map challenges and two presumably prize-heavy quest lines toward the end of August. Given the nature of those events I don’t believe I’ll be talking about them on here that much, but just know they’ll more than likely include lots of orbs, lots of colored level-up stones and some new Sacred Seals.
Also later this month, starting on Thursday actually, there’s going to be some events meant to help Fire Emblem Heroes newcomers… Though the events will also be beneficial to veterans like myself, if not more beneficial. A second “Hero Fest” banner will be coming for a week, allowing players to get the chance at popular heroes with an increased summoning chance. Plus, there will be a secondary log-in bonus to coincide with the starter support event that I believe will overlap with the anniversary bonus and give us an additional 20 orbs.
That’s at least 60 orbs, not including whatever we’re going to get from those special maps and quests I mentioned before.
I didn’t personally take advantage of the first Hero Fest when it rolled around since it happened during my very first orb collection binge (the one that got me to 200+ orbs I might add), though I get the feeling this one might sway me more easily if the heroes are desirable enough.
The reason this Hero Fest might sway me is also thanks to the final part of the anniversary celebration: Core summoning changes. Two of them to be exact.
First, a free first summon has been implemented.
Pretty much what you read is what you get with this one. Every time a new banner is released, the first five orb cost to summon one hero is waved. One hero free of charge.
While it isn’t much, the teaser given in regards to this change stands pretty true. Everyone can try each banner at least once, and there’s no harm in that when you have the possibility of drawing one of the rare focus heroes in that first summon.
Because that’s what we all say before sinking money into the pit hoping to get that hero we’ve already invested time and effort into finding.
Anyway…
Second, the rates of summoning four star and three star heroes have been switched. Now, starting with every summoning banner released on August 7th and beyond, it will actually be more common to summon four star heroes rather than three star heroes.
Before the change
After the change
This change, despite not applying to the ‘Summer focus’ and ‘Life and Death focus’ banners we already had before today, is actually really beneficial. If nothing else it makes it a lot easier to get your hands on higher leveled units that take less investment to train up if desirable, and there are a lot of abilities you can inherit that come from four star allies.
Since it ties in with a lot of what I talked about already, I figured it would also be worth brining up the Bound Hero Battle that began today featuring Cecilia and Lilina from Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade.
This special map collection offers a challenging map layout with three difficulty levels for summoners to try their hands at. The catch with each difficulty level is that you can’t lose a single unit. Once one of your four heroes dies, you automatically lose.
It’s a bit of a brutal task for sure, but those who have the skills to take it on can net themselves an extra nine orbs to put in the bank. Don’t think I’ll be able to beat the Infernal level since it really does live up to it’s name, but I’ve already beaten Hard and have a good strategy going for Lunatic, so we’ll have to see.
The special map challenge also comes with a brand new summoning focus:
With the focus on Roy, Cecilia and Lilina, this banner overall isn’t really for me. I already have all three heroes in my collection, so the increased chance at nabbing them really isn’t all that appealing. I still figured it would be worth mentioning, however, as this banner is the first to implement both the free first summon and the swapped summoning chances that I mentioned earlier.
I used my free summon and got a four star Stahl. He’s pretty useless… But the fact that I got a four star with my free summon kind of proves that something in the new system is working, right? I like to think so, anyway.
All of these new things in the game also coincide with the version 1.6 update, an update that includes a variety of changes also worth talking about… But changes that I’m not sure I have the energy for tonight.
Seriously, it’s right around 2 a.m. and this post has taken me much longer to write than I anticipated. While rambling ceaselessly in the early hours of the morning has served me well in the past, I’m afraid I’m just a little too tired to keep going. Probably in part due to feeling sick over the last couple of days, something which honestly should have driven me to bed sooner anyway.
Ah well, ’tis the life of a Masochist I suppose.
Because I have some time with my friends later today (during normal daytime hours) and orientation for the Daily Titan throughout the week, I think I’ll skip out on the version 1.6 talk tonight. If anything I’ll include that as a post-lengthener when I talk about the Hero Fest on Thursday, though it could come earlier if I feel the writing mood come on.
Either way stay tuned, it’ll be here.
Until then, let me know how you feel about the six-month anniversary celebration for Fire Emblem Heroes in the comments below! Are you as excited for all the cool give-a-ways as I am? Or are you more stuck in the kind of temporal confusion and awe in regards to time passing that I was toward the beginning of this post?
Before I sign off and hit the hay, I also thought this would be worth mentioning.
The other day I tried something strange by posting a tweet from my Nintendo Switch. To test the feature out I tweeted about the results of Splatoon 2’s first Splatfest.
A disappointing outcome… But that’s beside the point.
While posting to social media from my game console was an undoubtedly strange experience… It wasn’t necessarily one I was all that opposed to. Particularly if it’s the only real way to get the pictures I take on that device off of the device so I can show cool things off to the world.
Thus, although it probably won’t be an earth shattering change, I may just wind up posting to twitter independently more often with Switch-based content. That in itself could lead to more individual social media posts in general… Though for now I doubt it since I still like to tell myself I’m not a huge fan of using social media.
Still felt like it would be worth mentioning here as sort of a shameless self promotion. After all, if you’ve made it this far into the post you clearly enjoy my company to an extent, so it might be worth checking out my Twitter for some sort of an evolution in the future.
Even if it’s mostly a conduit for getting these blog posts you see already in front of more eyes as it currently stands.
I frankly relish the opportunities I get to mix work with leisure once in a while. Like when I had the chance to review Pokémon Sun and Moon for the Daily Titan, this week I published an article reviewing my latest mobile game obsession: Fire Emblem Heroes.
After the practice I had writing that Pokémon review last semester, this one felt much easier to craft overall. The only really difficult thing about it came in the juxtaposition between how I tend to write and the publication’s necessities. While I can easily write over 3,000 words dissecting the smallest things in a video game (as I’ve proven here time and time again), a general newspaper audience likely won’t care much for seeing me geek out for that long.
Thus, it was up to our A&E editor, Kaleb, to help reign me in and simmer down my work into something more succinct that hits right at the heart of the strengths and weaknesses of the game. He’s an awesome editor and an even greater guy to spend time with, and without his help I’d still be stuck with an over-embellished description of the differences between hand-to-hand weapons, magic and colorless units in the game.
He also does some pretty stellar reviews for the paper. I’d recommend his pretty recent Resident Evil 7 review, since I’m sure that’ll appeal to the kind of audience I tend to draw. He even did a multimedia live talking review about the game to go along with it, which is pretty sweet!
Even with Kaleb’s help, my article still wound up being the longest thing he published at about 800-900 words or so… But to be completely fair, this article might not technically be published in the same sense as the rest of my work for the DT. Because of some spacing concerns in our special weeklong sex-themed issue, A&E had to cut their page and run all their stories online. So this review wasn’t put out in print, but it was published online.
Luckily, for my purposes here, that’s more than good enough.
While there are plenty of things I feel have been left out of the review from the perspective of someone who obsesses too much over a game when he enjoys it, I still really like how this piece turned out. I’m sure if I ever want to dig deeper into the gameplay strategies and mechanics, or if I want to talk about my five star monsters Tiki and Minerva, I’ll write up a separate post some time in the near future.
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!
Like I said in my last post, it’s been a long weekend. After staying up for at least 27 hours writing and working, I’m looking forward to having a week off to focus on my schoolwork, especially since our staff writers are starting to work on stories.
As much as I enjoy writing, it’ll be nice not to have the editorial board stuck filling an entire paper on our own.
However, I’d say that the extra amount of time and effort I put in alongside my other editors was well worth the trouble, since the issue we produced is a really nice one. We have our large two-story coverage of the Point-In-Time homeless census written by me, my co-News Editor Sarah and our Managing Editor Micah, but there are also plenty of other stories worth reading.
One of those stories is a small read of the general campus climate following President Donald Trump’s executive order banning travel for some in the international community that was put in place last Friday. There are also stories on the new parking spaces available for CSUF students, an art exhibit with traditionally Japanese-styled artwork depicting various modern-day issues and the other story I wrote about the Titan Direct Access pilot program that has been introduced by Titan Shops and the campus Information Technology (IT) Department.
There’s more than that too, and in my opinion, the paper is worth throwing up here for you guys to see yourselves:
I’m still pretty exhausted though, honestly. There’s some homework I have to do… But really, I think I’m going to take a nap first.
If you want to see the story I wrote about the Titan Direct Access program, you can see it here. You can also see the story Sarah and I wrote about the homeless people our groups encountered during the Point-In-Time Count here. If you’re interested in seeing more, my whole archive of work for the Daily Titan can be found through the link over on the right!
Two articles in two days? Fairly unprecedented, but certainly not a bad thing I’d say.
While yesterday’s story was my profile for the Features page, this story is quite a bit more entertaining. I wrote a review for the Arts & Entertainment page for my buddy Kaleb, our A&E editor. As a hardcore newsy person, it’s been pretty nice to let my skills expand a bit this semester, I have to say. Because of my news-oriented background, I’m sure you all must be asking just what I wrote a review on exactly?
Well, Pokémon Sun and Moon of course. What else would I write on, I’m pretty much an expert in almost all things Pokémon and have nearly 90 hours sunk into the game. Plus, I almost never get to mix my passions for video games and writing on this kind of scale, so how could I pass up the opportunity to vomit all my thoughts on a page for mass consumption?
Also, when I say vomit all my thoughts, I pretty much mean it literally. I hit a weird place with this article to be honest. On the one hand, I know so much about the series and about Sun and Moon that it was simple to run through the list of everything I enjoy and everything I find less than stellar about the games. However, on the other hand I had to make sure not to get too in depth and nerdy with my writing because I was writing for an audience that probably won’t be as much of an expert in the subject as I am.
Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of people that see the article have never even touched Pokémon in their lives – as hard to imagine as that can be for someone like me.
Because of how much I had to say, I wound up writing a fairly long piece about the games, one that I expected to get cut down for spacing concerns. There wound up being far more room available than we expected in the end however, so the 1000+ word review ended up getting printed just about in its entirety.
I tried not to spoil any plot details or get too in depth with some of the deeper mechanics and things I enjoy about the games, but I still think I put together a really solid little review. I’ve talked about them more than enough on this site here, so I won’t reiterate much, but it’s a nice summary of a lot of things in a (somewhat) succinct package. So, check if out if you’ve got the chance, because I’m pretty proud of it!
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!
Oh, and just FYI, there may or may not be some extra multimedia content on the horizon to go along with this. But I’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.
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!
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!
Jason's Blog - Work in Progress 