VIDEO GAME: Mom Hid My Game! (2016)

Mom Hid My Game! Year: 2016 Rating: E Time Played: ~1 hour Mom Hid My Game! is one of those simple puzzle games that feel like they would easily fit into a larger mini-game structure (like the WarioWare series). Its simple gameplay makes for quick rounds of play, which comes in handy for the iterative process of determining the solution. Even its simple visual style hearkens to the peculiar games in the WarioWare franchise. Of course, with such limited objectives in such a game, there wasn’t much to do in Mom Hid My Game! once I completed all the puzzles. The premise of Mom Hid My Game! is explained in the title itself. A young child is trying to find the handheld gaming system that his mother has taken away (likely due to how obsessively the child plays it). The obstacles that separate the child from his game are as simple as doors and drawers and as complicated as an enormous hole in the living...
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MOVIE: Little Boy (2015)

Little Boy Year: 2015 Rating: PG-13 Length: 106 minutes / 1.77 hours When it comes to movies with strong Christian messages, often the resulting movie is weak for a variety of other reasons. This might be because of poorly written characters, plot holes, or an overall lack of cinematic quality in the movie itself. This is why I absolutely adore Little Boy (2015). There are many great Christian values presented here, including faith and accepting others. However, the little twists put in the plot of this World War II story make it just that much better than a generic Christian film. If only more Christian movies were made like this, then maybe the (valid) stigma against Christian media might be reduced. Perhaps the one aspect of Little Boy that strikes me as the most unique is the xenophobia against Hashimoto (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa). There have been plenty of movies about World War II, but you don’t see many of them addressing the racism against the Japanese...
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MOVIE: Drive My Car (2021)

Drive My CarYear: 2021Rating: UnratedLength: 179 minutes / 2.98 hours There are movies made to be entertaining, then there are movies that gaze into the soul of human existence and dare us to blink. Drive My Car (2021) is the latter. Grief is such a complex topic that few have successfully tackled it meaningfully or with the depth that this film does. It's slow, steady, and meandering through various subplots, but it eventually gets its point across in the most stoic ways possible. After all, it's challenging to grieve for someone who you know has wronged you. I am no stranger to three-hour-long foreign films, but even this one pushed my limits. The problem is, I'm not entirely sure what I would have cut from it to make it any shorter (although, they probably could have ended this film a little earlier since the last scene made little sense to me). All the subplots combine to make a meaningful statement of the...
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VIDEO GAME: Mario’s Super Picross (1995)

Mario’s Super Picross Year: 1995 Rating: Not Rated Time Played: 3,898 minutes / 64.97 hours It’s a little odd to me that Picross (or Nonograms) never took off as a puzzle genre outside of Japan. Sudoku and (my personal favorite) Kakuro eventually found popularity in the United States in the 2000s. This was likely due to the ease with which these puzzles could be printed. While Nonograms have the novelty of producing a pixelated two-tone image, they sometimes take up to 30 minutes to solve (especially for the more detailed puzzles). Pokémon Picross introduced me to Picross games, and it has the advantage of a stylus and touchscreen. The Japanese-only release of Mario’s Super Picross does not have this advantage. Mario’s Super Picross became available on the Super Nintendo Virtual Console for the Switch, which is what allowed me to finally play this game. While the controls take a little getting used to, this game’s one novelty is the little animations that play when solving...
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BOOK: My Little Ikigai Journal (2018)

My Little Ikigai Journal Year: 2018 Author: Amanda Kudo Length: 128 pages ***THIS BOOK WAS RECEIVED FROM A GOODREADS GIVEAWAY*** A few years ago, I had heard a little snippet about Ikigai and thought it was a great way to focus a person's life. Essentially, Ikigai is the Japanese concept that combines four qualities of a person's passion and concentrates them into a productive and meaningful life. The four tenets of Ikigai are the things a person loves, the talents where the person excels, the individual's worldview, and a recognition of where the person can make a difference in the world. At the center of all four of these ideas is the concept of Ikigai. This book is a handy journal that provides some exercises for the reader to help them consider these aspects of their life and how they can find their Ikigai. Each page either has an encouraging quote that ties to one of the four Ikigai pillars or a question for the reader to fill...
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MOVIE: Isle of Dogs (2018)

Isle of Dogs Year: 2018 Rating: PG-13 Length: 101 minutes / 1.68 hours A few years ago, I got on a Wes Anderson kick. I practically watched his entire filmography to that point in one long binge-worthy day. After catching up, I felt I truly appreciated his quirky, orthogonal cinematography and deeply complex characters. I’ve essentially been a fan of his since Moonrise Kingdom (2012), so I was looking forward to his latest work, Isle of Dogs (2018). After all, he had proven his skill at stop-motion animation with The Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) and had received nominations for Best Picture and Best Director for The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) since then. Unfortunately, while Isle of Dogs carries Anderson’s distinct style and charm, it felt a little watered down. Sure, the shots were full of their beauty and symmetry, and the story had its cute moments, but it mostly felt like he was on autopilot. Maybe the PG-13 rating was holding him back? I don’t know. In most fiction, there is a suspension of...
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BOOK: The Wind-up Bird Chronicle (1994)

The Wind-up Bird Chronicle Year: 1994 Author: Haruki Murakami Length: 1,572 minutes / 26.2 hours A coworker of mine suggested this book to me a few months back. The title sounded interesting, so I put it on my Overdrive wish list and waited for it to become available. Both he and I have a somewhat thorough understanding of Japanese culture, so once I got into this book, I found myself imagining it as an anime. Of course, because The Wind-up Bird Chronicle was originally written in Japanese, there are plenty of cultural idiosyncrasies that might be hard to understand from a different cultural viewpoint. At times, the content is a bit weird, the sex awkward, and the violence strangely surgical. What was quite refreshing with the narrative in The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, was its timelessness. Written in the early 1990’s and set in the mid-1980’s, only a few technological items (i.e. a land line, an early computer, etc.) haven’t held up well over time. Everything else...
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