BOOK: The 5 Love Languages of Children (1995)

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The 5 Love Languages of Children Year: 1995 Author: Gary Chapman and Ross Campbell Length: 224 pages Say what you will about any of the "personality type" analyses out there, but being able to categorize an individual can help to understand them. Whether it's Myers-Briggs, Enneagrams, or the 5 Love Languages, being able to relate to a grouping that helps explain a personality is a great way to find an identity. These may all be pseudoscience, but they're harmless if used in the right ways. The 5 Love Languages of Children helps identify how these personality traits show up in kids. As a parent, I found this book immensely useful because it revealed what the major (and minor) love languages of my two children are. Knowing how to best fill their "love tank" has helped my wife and I to manage our time with our kids. Knowing how these love languages may change as our kids grow up is just as useful as knowing that...
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VIDEO GAME: Chrono Trigger (2008)

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Chrono Trigger Year: 2008 Rating: E10+ Time Played: 34.27 hours I've tried to play through Chrono Trigger for a few decades now. Ever since my family lucked out and found this game in a Super Nintendo bundle at a garage sale, I've played through the first half of this game multiple times. Heck, I even bought it on the Wii virtual console because I had such fond memories of it, despite never having reached the end credits. It wasn't until I bought this game (again) for the Nintendo DS that I could truly appreciate the top-notch game Chrono Trigger from beginning to end. While I definitely appreciated some of the improvements the DS version made to the game (including automatic running and visible health/magic bars), the base game is mostly identical to the SNES version from 1995. What's amazing about this game is how it truly changed the JRPG formula by putting the battles right there on the screen with no cuts or transitions. Additionally,...
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MOVIE: Toy Story (1995)

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Toy StoryYear: 1995Rating: GLength: 81 minutes / 1.35 hours One benefit of having children is revisiting movies from my youth. I saw Toy Story (1995) in theaters and was immediately struck by how amazing it was that they made the entire film with computers. While this is no longer something that causes awe, there is something about the first movie to make this leap. Almost 30 years later, Toy Story shows its age in some of its visual aspects. However, the cinematography and storytelling here are top-notch and often made me ignore the CGI which is comparatively less polished than today’s effects. To Pixar’s credit, they did the best they could by focusing on slightly easier-to-animate characters than humans or animals. The people and pets in Toy Story look horrific (sometimes on purpose) but there has to be grace for the limitations of the time. Still, with the immense flexibility of the digital camera, some shots in Toy Story that would have...
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VIDEO GAME: Mario’s Picross (1995)

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Mario's PicrossYear: 1995Rating: ETime Played: 666 minutes / 11.1 hours For as many Picross games as I've played, I figured I should probably go back and play the "original" picross video game, Mario's Picross. Since most picross (or nonogram) puzzles are merely black-and-white pixelated images, it made sense to put this concept on the monochrome Game Boy. And while there's nothing significant to write home about in this entry, I can't help but feel that more recent iterations of picross have spoiled me when compared to the early versions of picross to hit the home console market. Some of the charm that Mario's Picross has comes from the artistic style of the puzzles mimicking the "Mario style" (i.e., inanimate objects with elongated eyes). Aside from these puzzles being in-theme for a Mario game, they're still the fairly basic objects that you'd expect out of a Picross game. I'm sure they crammed as many puzzles as they could into a Game Boy cartridge,...
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MOVIE: Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995)

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Die Hard with a Vengeance Year: 1995 Rating: R Length: 128 minutes / 2.13 hours It's interesting to go back and see certain points in a movie franchise where you could tell that they were already running out of ideas. I still think Die Hard (1988) is a fantastic action movie, and it's almost its own genre of action films. Movies falling into the "Die Hard on a/in a [BLANK]" category have since cemented its cultural significance. As of right now, the only Die Hard I haven't seen is Die Hard 2 (1990), but Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995) marks where the franchise departs from its roots. I will say that the casting for this movie was quite delightful, with excellent performances by Bruce Willis, Samuel L. Jackson, and Jeremy Irons. I can also appreciate how this film tried to tie back to the original by using the original director and the fantastic work of Irons' antagonist. Action-wise, it's what you'd expect from a...
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VIDEO GAME: Mario’s Super Picross (1995)

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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: Alvin Journeyman (1995)

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Alvin Journeyman Year: 1995 Author: Orson Scott Card Length: 902 minutes / 15.03 hours With this fourth book in the Alvin Maker series, I’m starting to see why a lot of writers like to stick to trilogies. If anything, I think most readers can probably skip this volume and move on to the next one because there wasn’t anything too new or interesting that happened in it. If anything, it was a re-hash of events in the previous book with a few new characters added to it. I will concede that Alvin Journeyman did finally develop a fitting antagonist for Alvin. Still, so few pages were dedicated to this sub-plot that I’m wondering if it should have just been pulled out and made into its own novella that would span the gap between book three and book five. Once again, the strength of the series as a whole carries through here, and some loose character arcs are tied up before moving on to more important things. However, spending the...
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MOVIE: Heat (1995)

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Heat Year: 1995 Rating: R Length: 170 minutes / 2.83 hours It’s interesting to go back and watch something by Michael Mann after seeing his later work. I enjoyed Collateral (2004) and considered it to be a well-directed film. Of course, there’s deliberate pacing and acceleration of Collateral that drew me in. Unfortunately, this biased me somewhat when I sat down to watch Heat (1995). Stylistically, both are fairly similar and use similar locales. However, at almost three hours long, some of the pacing in Heat made me think that it could have used a bit of a trim in the first half. I understand the deliberate nature of the buildup of the first half, with each event introducing some core tenet of the main characters that come to fruition by the end of the film. It helps that there’s a good bit of action early on, but until the twist that happens about half-way through occurs, the comparison to the pacing of the second half makes the early part of this movie...
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