Hanukkah came early this year

The latter half of this Thanksgiving Break has included a lot of media binging with my family. So much so, in fact, that I had planned on writing something today which could serve as miniature reviews of “Daredevil” season 3 on Netflix and “Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams” on Amazon Prime.

But then we wound up going out for most of the day, and that distraction coupled with my overall lethargy kind of killed any desire to do a serious, hard review of things tonight.

So here’s a two sentence review of each:

• “Daredevil’s” third season, despite starting slow, becomes one of the best Marvel Netflix shows due to its compelling characters, brilliantly used set-pieces and themes of religious disillusionment and government corruption. The show is engagingly dramatic in all the right ways and builds up to a crescendo of an encounter in the last episode that serves as a perfect catharsis for the Matt Murdock.
• “Electric Dreams” is an anthology sci-fi series in the same vein as the Twilight Zone, which tackles similar societal and psychological scenarios that are the apparent long-reaching effects of modern-day consumerism, technological advancements and fear mongering politics — all based on modernized Philip K. Dick short stories. My Dad and I watched the show on a whim and (except for one or two episodes) did not regret the experience in the slightest thanks to their varied directorial styles, futuristic concepts designed with well-done CGI and some really dark, thoughtful stories.

I would recommend both of these shows if you have the appropriate streaming services. Though, as a fair warning, “Electric Dreams” might just give you a dejected, jaded world view for a short time after.

I know I certainly felt somewhat paranoid taking out the trash after watching the final (and in my opinion best) episode. Very poignant in today’s media scape.

With that said, let’s move on. Even though Dad and I stayed up extra late finishing the latter show, we still had to get up and do chores this afternoon.

But before we went out to do chores, my Mom (for reasons I’m still don’t really know) decided to give Aly and I some of the more goofy, kitchy Hanukkah gifts she bought. Despite the fact that Hanukkah starts on December 2.

So even though the holiday is much earlier than usual on the Gregorian calendar this year, she still decided to give us some of our gifts weeks in advance?

Don’t know guys, I’m just rolling with it. Mostly because it gave me something kind of funny to talk about on a night where I don’t feel like exerting a whole lot of effort.

For instance, one gift that she got for both of the Rochlin siblings was:

Big ol’ cotton balls that vaguely feel snow-like in texture meant to stand-in as snowballs for us west coasters in the blazing tropics.

Cool? I guess?

I mean don’t get me wrong it was fun pelting people with these things and there’s basically no way they could hurt anyone. But… Still a strange and kind of random gift.

Though I still don’t think they top this other gift in terms of randomness:

Marvel socks!

Marvel socks?

Yeah, again I’m not entirely sure where the inspiration to get these came from. But they are actually kinda cool and much more useful than fake snowballs.

Like sure I know in my Stan Lee tribute post I talked all about how I don’t have a ton of experience with the Marvel universe outside of movies. But that said I do love me some Marvel movies.

Plus some of these socks are kind of nice. I’d wear the Spider-Man ones, or the Captain America ones or the Ghost Rider ones just because they’re nice designs.

I’d also wear the Red Skull socks because, let’s be honest, they’re so incredibly dumb that how could I not?

What a fuckin’ goof he is.

So long story short, I may have a ton of socks already, this may be one of the strangest, most random gifts I’ve ever gotten and we completely disregarded the ‘advent calendar’ packaging for the socks (because that was something they were trying to do)…

But that doesn’t mean I won’t wear them ever. Plus even if I don’t, Alyson already stole the Rocket Raccoon socks, so someone will.

Oh yeah, let’s not forget that while we were out, we happened to pick up a copy of a certain new Pokémon game for a certain Nintendo Switch.

But I’m pretty sure I’m supposed to pretend I don’t know that yet, so more on that some other day.

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P.S. — Featured image courtesy of Shlomo via Wikimedia Commons.

Because we haven’t actually broken out any of the Hanukkah stuff in our house yet.

Feasting with the Family

Don’t have a big fancy blog post planned for today, because I think it should just be a time to spend with family and/or friends.

So I just wanted to wish everyone a happy Thanksgiving!

Especially since my family is meeting earlier than usual today and I can send along those good vibes with good food:

And good dogs:

Hope you all have a lovely day and a great feast for the holiday!

Giving less than thanks

Happy Thanksgiving Break week, everybody!

What a wonderful time it is to start decompressing a bit and spend extra time with your family and friends.

Unless you’re like me this year.

Fair warning, this is a ranting vent post. So if you enjoy railing against people who do terrible things, you’ve come to the right place.

This is the first time in a number of years that Cal State Fullerton has remained open the Monday of Thanksgiving Break. Every other year I’ve been here, we’ve gotten the whole week off.

That’s annoying, but a lot of my friends have never had the luxury of a full week off, so it would feel a bit disingenuous to complain about that alone.

Everything’s relative.

The annoying part comes from the fact that most teachers decided they would either cancel their classes or just offer online coursework today. Because they, too, would rather have the whole week off as it turns out.

My Evolution and Creation professor was very eager to just not have class today. However, my Learning and Memory professor decided to keep the train going.

Naturally his class is the one that offers so much compact material that I knew I’d have to come in for it at risk of falling dangerously behind. Otherwise I would have skipped out and joined my family in Burbank.

To be fair, I also have to come in tomorrow for a mandatory internship orientation, so I would have had school this week no matter what.

The part about today that really bugged me was the execution.

To set the scene: It’s a cloudy, dreary day in Orange County and campus is next to empty (hence my featured image of the often bustling Library). The universe seems to be in agreement that things aren’t right.

Every student who is here seems downtrodden, as if the gloom of coming in during Thanksgiving Break was folding into the gloomy grey skies.

When I get to my class on the sixth floor of the Humanities building, a typically 35-ish headcount of students has been reduced to about 12.

As the professor starts to take roll amid the sound of the 1:00 p.m. clock tower chime, he pauses after a string of missing names.

He says, and I quote: “What, is it a holiday or something?”

Then he offers a cheeky grin to the audience, as if the villainous character in a reality T.V. show’s confessional booth.

How much of a dick to you have to be to crack a joke about how you’ve forced your students to come in when they didn’t necessarily have to? It’s just a cruel, self-aware form of torture.

From there it was an average lecture. Lots of densely-packed information over an hour-and-a-half. It sucked to be there, but at least I felt somewhat justified by the breadth of material.

Plus, I incurred an extra benefit by getting back my research paper final draft considering I turned it in early. It was the paper from this earlier post actually.

I got an A on the final draft. Frankly that’s all that matters.

However… He was somehow even more frustrating by proxy.

On the rough draft, he said my paper was an “excellent start” before giving me a C. It was littered with red marks, to the point where I wondered how he could justify calling it excellent in any respect.

The final draft had this message adorning the front:

Seems like a great message to accompany an A grade, right?

Unfortunately the message feels very disingenuous when you see just how much the final draft is still littered with red ink.

I don’t get it, man. The mixed messages are real.

But hey, I never have to think about the paper again. So I can’t complain.

I just wish that my being required to come in wasn’t accompanied by such a frustrating series of events. It doesn’t help that cancelled plans made the drive out feel like more of a waste of time.

That’s not a judgement call on the person I made plans with, since I know they’ll read this ❤

Hence why I’m sitting here in the Library writing this blog post and working on some homework to justify the time.

If nothing else I appreciate seeing campus as empty as it is during the daytime. It offers me the chance to hang out in places that I couldn’t normally.

Such as the seat by this statue’s butt near a Starbucks.

Could have never gotten that picture normally and I kind of love it?

So long as you ignore my 5 o’clock shadow and devil horns.

I really need a haircut soon. Perhaps I’ll try to do that over the break once it starts.

But that feels like a post for another day.

Our new Toy Opening channel

After a lovely family lunch at Mama D’s with my grandparents to celebrate my Grandpa Joe’s belated birthday, Alyson made me take her over to Target.

She didn’t need anything. She just wanted to wander aimlessly and kill time.

To be fair I do that sort of thing with my friends constantly, to the point where we covertly call ourselves the ‘Loiter Bois,’ so I couldn’t argue. In fact I was pretty into the idea. Especially considering Pokémon Let’s Go Eevee & Pikachu just came out and I was interested in seeing it on shelves as I start to prepare my holiday wish list.

But then something happened. Idly wandering the video game and toy aisles making fun of things turned into more when she found this rip-off Lego Pokémon toy of one of my favorites:

Isn’t Mimikyu just the cutest? Who needs Pikachu when you’ve got one of them, huh?

On the one hand, I don’t know why I let her convinced me to buy this thing. I just started cleaning my room up for the Thanksgiving Break, and having another little figurine to take up space seems counterintuitive. Plus, when I say this thing was a Lego rip-off, I mean it is like a real cheap Lego rip-off.

Just look at how weirdly confusing and unintuitive these instructions are.

Somehow it manages to take a Lego figurine made out of ~20 pieces and not distinctly separate out which pieces are what for big chunks of the instructions. It took some time to figure out which parts went where.

But at the very least I suppose these Mega Construx are similar to Lego in that they have just random extra pieces for no reason.

Where do you go, random circle piece? I don’t see you anywhere in the instructions.

Granted I did just complain that the instructions were unintuitive so maybe I’m just missing something… But oh well.

On the other hand, despite those points, I really can’t complain about the purchase. It was maybe six dollars for a pseudo-figurine of one of my favorite Pokémon and it came with a Premiere Ball, which is also probably my favorite kind of Poké Ball.

Its creepy long neck might just haunt me in my dreams, but I’ll happily suffer that fate for Mimikyu.

However, I didn’t just buy this fake Lego. I was pretty close to putting it down and not buying anything because it just didn’t seem worth it to get one item. Especially if that one item was a dumb toy like this.

So my sister made up for it by buying another toy while we were there:

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Yeah that’s right, I know you’ve seen these kinds of dumb collectible packs for every popular culture property in existence.

Well we got one to open up for ourselves just for the hell of it. Even though the movie isn’t out yet as of my writing this, so who knows if it’ll be worth supporting fringe toy-based ventures for it.

All I know is it definitely became worth it when we decided to do this jokey, vague toy opening YouTube channel parody just to put here on the old blog.

See? Even though I make fun of her a bunch on here, she’s still more than happy to make herself look stupid alongside me when the time comes.

I guess this is the part where I would tell you all to like, comment and subscribe to my channel like every cliché in the book tells me I should? But honestly I just use that thing as a dumping place for videos that I want to throw up on my blog, as WordPress has kind of terrible compression when videos and such are concerned.

But that’s going way into the weeds for no reason. I just wanted to share the fun, silly thing my sister and I did today.

Hope you like it.

Musings on what’s ahead

Again, life seems to have thrown me a bone with this whole pre-Thanksgiving Break school stuff.

My 4:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. class tonight was easier than usual, much like yesterday’s class was. Not because of the content of the class this time around, but because we miraculously got out in just an hour rather than three.

Okay well it wasn’t miraculous, I suppose.

The professor for my Visual Communications class is apparently a part of an administrative group set to appoint new professors in his department this semester. Part of that obligation means occasional meetings with the rest of that group.

Including meetings he was not previously aware of. Such as the one that he wound up having today during out class period.

Thus: Surprise! Only an hour’s worth of class before we were let out and allowed to roam free.

It always feels good to get home early on a day where I expected to be sticking around late. Especially when that gives me extra time to do the stuff I need to do, like edit a piece for Gladeo. Or edit a research paper proposal for my Evolution and Creation class. Or help edit an oral history project for my friend Tiana.

Apparently it’s just an edit-heavy kind of night.

After doing all that work I wound up sitting here close to 10:00 p.m. realizing I didn’t have any ideas for a blog post. Yet I didn’t want to just leave well enough alone, so I figured I would hike up my jeans and write… Something.

Anything.

Yet I mulled it over a bit and couldn’t come up with anything substantial. At least nothing I was willing to try to scrounge together in the next two hours.

Figured it would work to do one of my patented ‘deflecting my responsibility to write now by writing about the things I’m going to write about in the future’-type posts and call it a night. Get some Monster Hunter in or something before having to go to bed for my hematologist appointment in the morning.

Speaking of, that’s probably what I’m going to be writing about tomorrow. Not really because of the hematologist stuff in particular, since it’s just my (at this point) quarterly check-up.

Instead I think I’m going to write about a somewhat tangential point: My weight loss progress.

I haven’t checked my weight since my physical a few months back, so it’ll be good to see whether or not exercising regularly has helped out. Or it’ll be bad to see that exercising regularly has not helped, which will potentially completely demoralize all the progress I’ve been trying to make.

So that’ll be fun.

The day after that I’ll probably have a post about a tour at the Long Beach Post that I’m going on with the Fullerton SPJ chapter.

That should ACTUALLY be fun, hopefully. Not like the sarcastic fun I just joked about.

Once the weekend hits, I’ll see about finally hitting Toby Fox’s Deltarune. Maybe write something about that. The momentum of the weekend could also help me finally hit on a Monster Hunter-related post, regarding my current obsession with armor planning perhaps.

Next Tuesday I have a mandatory internship orientation. There might be something good to glean out of that for a blog post?

I don’t know, I’m kind of grasping at straws by this point aren’t I?

I’d rather not keep you all here for some random bs I’m cobbling together. So I’ll let you go free with a hopeful “come again soon!” like some kind of 7/11 exit sign.

…

Yeah okay I’m just rambling now. Good night, everybody.

My current hiatus and updated article archive

From the state of this blog currently, I imagine some of you think that I totally dropped off the grid and lost my way in the world of Pokémon, never to return to this mortal realm.

That’s not totally inaccurate, honestly.

However, Ultra Moon isn’t the only thing that’s been taking up my time. Yeah, I have been spending extra time carefully combing through it than usual, absorbing everything that’s different from the original games (something I’m sure I’ll talk about eventually), but my Thanksgiving Break had a good amount more to it.

• I cleaned my room for the first time since the summer, which was a great personal accomplishment. It seriously needed it.
• I got ahead on a bunch of assignment for school, including a video project I had to come to campus to work on despite it being a week off.
• I had a lovely Thanksgiving feast at my Aunt’s house, along with a few of their family friends (including a particularly interesting Egyptian man who had to escape as a refugee during the Arab Spring crisis, super cool guy).

There were also a few things I’m sure, but honestly those were the major highlights I can think of, since the rest was relaxing and catching up on some much needed sleep.

One thing I didn’t do that I had wanted to was write a few personal or more fun things here on my blog. I’ve been sitting on an idea for a Duel Links topic that’s been mulling over in my head for a few months, there’s some stuff for Gladeo and my work with Boom I’ve wanted to update for a long time and I figure it might be fun to do a ‘what I want for the holidays’ list given that Hannukah starts on Dec. 12 this year.

But I just never got around to it. Unfortunately, I might not have that much time to get to it in the near future either, since these last two weeks of the semester are going to be rather hectic with projects and exams. So, I at least wanted to put out something quick now to mention that things are probably going to be quiet for a bit.

… Unless I publish a story, of course. Or wind up having a 3 a.m. Fire Emblem Heroes binge again, which may end up happening soon with some big things on the horizon there.

Speaking of publishing stories, I actually wound up writing three articles just before Thanksgiving Break began. I meant to write something talking about it earlier, but like I said… Being lazy and forgetful came along with my relaxation.

Figured at the very least I should give the articles a little lightning round now in case anyone is curious:

1. My friends at Project Rebound invited me to a luncheon celebrating a new donor and bringing in the holiday spirit after I started working on my multimedia class final profile on the program director, Romarilyn. It was a nice little event that I wound up writing about because we needed the space filled. You can check that article out here.
2. On the same night that I wrote about Project Rebound, there was a four-car collision outside of the College Park building. I was the only news desk representative in the room, so I was sent out to cover it. It didn’t wind up being a super weighty story, but we got comments from the police so it was something. At the very least, it was an interesting experience doing two deadline stories in one night. You can check that article out here.
3. The day after writing the last two articles, we got an email from Chief Communications Officer Jeffrey Cook letting us know that the school had tallied up how much Milo Yiannopoulos’ visit cost them through things like security. I talked with him and University Police Captain Scot Willey to find out exactly how it all broke down and wrote up a nice, meaty little story about it that night. However, I wasn’t done yet, as I still wanted to get comments from the Vice President of Administration and Finance Danny Kim (since he was the guy every other source pointed me to). I managed to get in touch with him, so we updated that article the Friday before break with more detail. I even got my hands on his personal number for future use and found out that his office really liked the original article I wrote. Felt really good, honestly. You can check out that article here.

As usual, if you want to see my full archive of work for the Titan, you can look over on the right.

For now, I’m going to go back to work, since we’re on our first post-break deadline. Like I said, I just wanted to basically let the world know that I might not be all too active for the next couple weeks.

If anything, you can maybe check out my Twitter for a little more activity. I’ve been trying to do more there, and recently that’s included doing some Pokémon posts as I make my way through the game. So, you can see such gems as:

Game Freak, why are you trying to convince me there's a wanted coalition of ditto going around transforming into humans? #UltraSun pic.twitter.com/di8bIgd6UJ

— Jason Rochlin (@jdrochlin) November 20, 2017

And:

Honestly I'm pretty sure I'm playing a Pokémon fan fiction at this point. #UltraMoon pic.twitter.com/v81XuqVhHm

— Jason Rochlin (@jdrochlin) November 21, 2017

Maybe that sort of thing strikes your fancy, but if not I swear I’ll be back on a more active post schedule come Winter Break with some hopefully interesting content. Probably.

Alola begins anew

It may only be a year after we were first introduced to the Alola region in Pokémon Sun and Moon… But as a self-proclaimed hardcore Pokémon fanatic, I simply couldn’t resist going out to get the next addition to the series on day one.

I’ll admit, it does help that my Mom agreed to help pay off half the cost as sort of an early holiday gift. I was going to do it anyway, though.

Plus, it also helps that Thanksgiving Break has officially started for me, so I have a whole week to start pouring into some Pokémon when I’m not doing whatever assignments I have.

Or when I’m not writing blog posts like this. I still owe myself one for the three stories I published the week before we left, so hopefully I won’t get too sucked into the game.

That being said, this  post is going to be short and sweet because, frankly, I’m really excited to get into Ultra Moon. Because Mega Noivern for life. Also because Alyson is going to play Ultra Sun given she prefers Solgaleo, as evidenced by her McDonald’s Happy Meal toy from the other day:

I can appreciate the glowing eyes, though Rowlet is still my baby boy so I couldn’t resist not getting him, as you can see in the featured image at the top of this post.

I know the games are going to be fairly different than the originals from all of the pre-release trailers, so now I’m going to see just how different they are, and by extension whether they’re more worth going after than the originals.

To be completely honest, one of the big aspects that might sway that decision for me is how much time and effort the Rainbow Rocket team gets. Seriously Game Freak, you better have added in the original theme songs for each villain team boss or I’m going to be so disappointed in you.

Anyway, all that said, I’m going to go play some Pokémon now. Probably expect a few comparison-type posts in the near future as I work through Ultra Moon, or at least expect a team recap by the end of my journey. I still have to decide who I’m going to use after all, since I’m not going to go with the same squad as I used my first go-around.

Those guys are special to my Moon playthrough. I couldn’t just recreate them.

It does make my job harder since there’s a lot of options that are my favorites now excluded… But I’ll figure it out. Probably going to start with Popplio this time around, I think. Because I’m not sure what other Water-type I would want to use if not Wishiwashi, and because… Well, come on.

How freakin adorable, right? Right.

Sorry Litten, you’ll get your time in the spotlight soon enough. There’s just some other Fire-types I want to give a whirl this time around.

Okay, for real this time, I’ll catch you all later. If you got US&UM like me, let me know what you think about the games! I’d love to hear your thoughts somewhere on the internet.