I DID IT!!! I FINISHED IT BEFORE 3 RELEASED!!! miracle upon miracles. read my deranged essay here

this was so unbelievably DELIGHTFUL!! my friends and i have been huge fans of the KNIVES OUT movies since we watched the first one together at the cinema under the assumption that we were going to watch some kind of mid weird cluedo movie. never been so wrong. we've watched them all together since, so we finally found some free time that lined up and we watched this one tonight.

i really loved it!! i do think the backing cast was a bit under utelised, none of the movies after the first one have come close to creating compelling characters that i personally believe all could have had reason to murder someone. idk, kind of felt like they were just there to pad out the story - but! i really liked the story itself, this one was really lovely and heartfelt so i can forgive it for being very honed in on father jud's story and development. it was also just so fun, like i had such a good time watching it. close tie for first place, but as it currently stands i'm going KNIVES OUT, WAKE UP DEAD MAN, GLASS ONION in terms of personal ranking. i want like 20 of these movies though, i will never get tired of them

watching in light of recent events. i love this movie a whole lot (& the stephen king novella it's based on, THE BODY!), i had a wild childhood and my friends and i were a tight knit group of 4 so i have a real soft spot for movies about pre-teens doing questionable shennanigans. idk there's something about media about carrying the weight of something you don't quite understand yet that just Gets me. that, and "i never had any friends later on like the ones i did when i was 12 - jesus, does anyone?" is an agonizing line

this is a delightful little aussie drama, but kind of like a comedy drama? idk I love it so much, it's such a cozy little feel good movie about the team managing one of the primary satellites in australia that was going to broadcast apollo 11's launch and man's arrival on the moon. it's based on the true story of parkes observatory and its ultimately successful broadcast of the moon landing!

i have such a soft spot for our aussie media, the historical stuff is rarely always perfect but every now and then there's a banger that doesn't take itself too seriously and this has gotta be one of them

screenshots are boring so i wanna hang onto my top albums and songs of the year a better way :)

i listened to about 50k minutes of music this year, which is much less than usual! i average 70 - 80 most years. good to see wasteland, baby! retaining it's rightful spot as #1 as it has since 2019. i also forgot i 100%ed DISCO ELYSIUM this year so that explains all the sea power in here lmao

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been chipping my way through these wonderful games on my switch this month because my power and wifi has been very flakey with these consistent storms, so i'd been looking for something to keep me busy that doesn't rely on stable internet. i love them, they really do hold up and i love coming back to them every couple of years and replaying and finding the silly bits and pieces i forgot about. watched the anime a couple of years ago with my friends for the first time but since then, haven't put a lot of thought into the series until i spotted a 11.5 hour retrospective pop up on my recommendations and thought well, might as well!

this was the first three games, the ones that were remastered and released in 2019 for new consoles. not sure if i'm going to go ahead with the future installments yet? maybe if the worms don't leave my brain.

listen. it wasn't perfect. but. five stars. a hundred stars. im insane im rabid i fucking LOVED THIS MOVIE!!!!!!!!!

i have been VERY eagerly anticipating this movie since it's announcement in 2023 because i knew that guillermo del toro had been floating around the idea of a book-faithful adaptation of the novel for a long time now. i was so excited about the trailer, i was sooo worried i was going to be disappointed but NO! LOVED IT!!! though! i am willing to admit it is not a very good adaptation. good interpretation, certainly! very unfaithful to the book, however. the tweaks made to the narrative were pretty major, but i honestly did not expect a guillermo del toro movie to not be sympathetic to the monster. for what it was, i absolutely loved the characterisation for cinematic victor and the creature; making victor harsher and crueller in the image of his (movie backstory) father, making the creature softer and gentler and never killing out of malicious intent. AUGH. i have a feeling this is going to be very divisive; if changing the creature's attitude towards violence is a good change or an insult to the narrative, buuuutt i personally quite enjoyed it. the creature has always been very kicked-dog-vibes to me, so a narrative where it lashes out in aggression and anger or a movie where it reaches out with tentative, terrified hope are both delightful in my eyes. the ending was also slightly different but only by virtue of being more hopeful, which i liked very much for this interpretation. to forgive is very human, i liked that they both got to have that moment.

do i think the people who hate this movie are wrong? not necessarily; i have been disappointed again and again waiting on a book faithful frankenstein movie, so i understand the frustration. i do think this movie was lovely though for what it was, i think it was very pretty and it did live up to my mild expectations. loved the creature design! i'm afraid my hunt for a good book accurate frankenstein movie will be continuing though

a truly legendary broadcast. i cannot believe this was done live without pre-recordings. this is a wonderful little radio show about an alien invasion that caused a bit of havoc when it was aired, due to it being presented as a factual news broadcast. it is a delight. you can listen to it on youtube!

this, to me, is the perfect follow up to any FRANKENSTEIN media AND! it's free in HD on youtube!!

positively delightful dark comedy, loosely based off a lovecraft story but much more enjoyable than it's source material imo. wonderful film. wonderful 80s-core practical effects. strong recommendation to anyone who likes silly over the top horror.

what else could i have watched on this delightfully stormy halloween night? we've had some hectic weather here over the last week and as soon as the afternoon brought endless rumbling thunder and nice, dark clouds, i knew exactly what my halloween night movie was gonna be.

despite every single iteration of FRANKENSTEIN over the decades getting more and more technologically advanced, i really do think none of them hold a candle to the 1931 film. they miss the mark a lot of the time, many of them feel like they were written by people who didn't so much as look at the novel. i'm yet to see guillermo del toro's upcoming film, and i do have quite high hopes for it, but at this point i'm just not convinced anything is going to knock this absolute legend of a film off my peak cinema list.

watched both of these in preperation for the new film!!! i'm so attached to these movies, i don't think the 3rd one is gonna be any good but god knows i will watch anything they put out about crime magicians. delightful.

this game is something i decided to play after watching someone on youtube check it out, and it was so intriguing to me that i stopped it halfway through the first video and decided i needed to solve it for myself. i absolutely love this game, the first day i decided to check it out, i accidentally sunk 6 straight hours into it. the game works like this: you are a young boy who has inherited his uncle's 45 room mansion, under one condition: he can keep it only if he finds the secret 46th room. each room is a square on a grid and moving to the next square presents you with three random room options that give several different buffs or negative effects, and from there you have to try to build your way up to the top of the map and find the missing room. it is fantastic, especially when you start to figure out what you can do in order to buff your next run.

a couple of years ago, i solved CAIN'S JAWBONE - playing this game felt a lot like that! the main mystery had a pretty straightforward solution, i thought, but every single run i played, i was finding new mysteries and lore and puzzles to figure out. i haven't finished the game yet and i have a feeling that even completing the main objective won't give me all the answers the game is setting up, and i'll have to do a bit more digging to fully uncover everything this game has to offer. my only gripe with the game is that a lot if it relies on rng so it takes away any need for skill, but that's just a me thing; i enjoy difficult games personally, but BLUE PRINCE is engaging in so many ways that even when bad rng ends my run, i feel like i've learned more about the game and story.

definitely recommend this one if you like puzzles! otherwise, that youtube series i mentioned earlier is great - it's two brothers playing it together and bickering about choices the entire time, it's loads of fun

i'm a big conjuring enjoyer!! i made my friends watch the first one in theaters with me for my 13th birthday and they cried about it and had to go next door to watch WATER FOR ELEPHANTS to calm down. i am not joking.

that being said, i know the warrens' cases well and i did know this was going to be their last case when i read the synopsis. i did expect it to get a bit silly, but i think this movie ran for like 20min too long. the end got real silly, i know it's a dramatised movie of the world's most committed ghost hunting grift, but y'know, the rest of them felt a bit more realistic than this one. that being said, i enjoyed most of it and i had fun and really, what else can you ask for in a silly october demon movie

yes. i watched it twice this year. i dont even care i love it so bad

mandatory yearly rewatch of one of my fav films on the planet

even if you were normal on the internet in the 2010s, you may have been familiar with slenderman and all of the shakycam found footage youtube channels it spawned. marble hornets was one of them, and though it ended some good 10+ years ago, a little 5 part miniseries was published on the channel this last month. i believe it's a kind of what-if scenario, parallel to the original series. i'm not actually sure what the occasion was, i just got the jumpscare of my life when i got a notification from youtube about the marble hornets channel posting a new video earlier this month.

this really was delightful, it was very nice to see these guys again and the silly little operator again. i liked the parallels it draws to the original series and, though short, it did manage to capture the excitement of waiting for a new episode and trying to spot the operator in the background of the footage every time there's a loud static noise on screen. oh to be a teenager on the internet again

this is a reasonably long book series and i'm going to separate it into it's different "phases" - the original book releases from 2007-14, and the second phase from 2017-22 once i've finished reading it. my reasoning for this is because it's unfair to group these phases together, because the first one is substantially better than the second, and i have little interest in the third and current ongoing phase. this entry covers the first 9 books, or phase 1 of the series.

SP was my childhood favourite book series that i got to follow along with while i was growing up. i would actually say this was my first proper book series that i was really independantly into (alongside animorphs and goosebumps, which really does explain a lot about me as a person). i got into the series when i was 10, so i think only the first two books were out by that point. the great thing is, they hold up fantastically, even almost 20 years later. i love modern magic, this series is a wonderfully delightful modern magic detective series complete with questionably not-quite-age-appropriate violence, and humour that absolutely shaped my own sense of humour for the forseeable future. i see a lot of early parts of myself in these books and it makes me very emo about it every time!!!

this is the first time i've sat down and re-read this series the entire way through probably since high school. they are delightfully easy to get into and read, they're fast-paced and engaging. i know a lot of the complaints people have about this series when revisiting as an adult is that they're not very sincere and move too fast but like, they're for middle school kids. no 14yo wants to hear about emotionally mature conversations, they want to hear about magically exploding people into viscera. it's wonderful. i do really respect the way these books mature with both the main character and the expected target audience; they get a little more brutal with each book, and you can really tell around book 5 or so when the author just said fuck it, i have the audience, it's time to lock in on the story.

i really cannot recommend these books enough. i know this might be the nostalgia talking, but they are wonderfully character driven narratives, they're funny and genuinely just a lot of fun, they're full of flawed characters doing their best but also sometimes their worst, and also they're about a magic talking skeleton and idk what else needs to be said.

3.5 stars if i had a half star. this is a biography about the author's cousin, who unexpectedly became a serial bank robber known as the "floppy hat bandit" in the 60s, and the events leading up to that choice, his capture, and attempted escapes.

i grabbed this from the library while i was there looking for a completely unrelated series. it caught my eye because i, personally, love a good bank robbery story. i think bank heists, art heists, and jewellry heists are fuckin awesome and, y'know, mostly victimless. i don't read true crime very often because i find it exploitative, often handled disrespectfully, and it's just not an industry i'm interested in. however, like i said. mostly victimless crime.

i did enjoy this! got through it in one sitting quite easily. i think it had odd long-winded pacing and took quite some time to get into the bank robbery discussion, with the majority of the first half of the book being a set up and exposition on the author's evangelical background, but it's somewhat relevant to the story so i wasn't too fussed about it. interesting read about something i'd never heard about, did ultimately enjoy it in the end!

i was apprehensive about this for no real reason, i think i just thought it would be a pretty generic kinda DETROIT: BECOME HUMAN situation but then i saw a) how short it was and b) it is also a reasonably small book series so i figured i'd watch a couple of episodes to see how i felt about it.

anyway so like 6hrs later i had finished the whole thing in one sitting and i loved it, oh my gooodddd what a lovely delightful little story. i'd have been happy if this was a one and done thing, but there's supposedly a season 2 on the way so i'm absolutely going to be reading those books in the meantime!! i liked this a lot more than i expected, i think it was very endearing and sweet and a little bit silly goofy but in all the right ways

listen man. listen. the brainworms got to me.

the original modern warfare trilogy was, probably like many other people my age, one of my all time favourite COD series when i was younger. i do not care and have not cared since about any other game in the franchise, aside from a few sporadic black ops games and maybe I kind of liked that random WW2 entry from a few years ago. the reboot series doesn't hold a candle to the original in my opinion, however, i don't have any of my old consoles set up and this is the best i got. played the campaign, had a good time, will not be touching the reboot mw3 because it fucking sucked and i hated it. we begin and end here and i gotta put it on the list because i told myself i'd stop excluding embarassing media in the interest of honesty

this is a re-attempt to get through this book, as i DNF'd it a couple of years ago. the premise is a scoutmaster and a troop of scouts are abandoned on an island with a sinister parasite that threatens to kill them and eat their flesh or whatever. this sounded right up my alley, i loooove body horror so much and i love gross flesh eating worms and shit, i thrive off this. i was severely disappointed on my initial attempt to find out that this book was effectively LORD OF THE FLIES but with worms. i got very bored and eventually put it down, some time in 2020.

this week, i decided to give it another go just because i was gonna be stuck on a long train ride without much to do, so i might as well take it with me and try again after a few years' break. On so many levels, i can understand why people keep recommending me this book but, to be honest, I think my issue is that it's way too long. it's very repetitive and nothing really happens, and it suffers by being bogged down by too much yapping and extended decorative metaphors with cringe prose that are just like....way too much. ugh idk man, it could've been a really good slimlined 200pg book, i think. it kind of ended up being a series of frustratingly poor decision that did not need to happen, and every single character was so painfully cookie-cutter stereotyped (including the author's very evident favourite, who ended up being the 'final girl' of the book and I saw that coming from like, chapter 2), so nothing was overly surprising or compelling, and ultimately yeah it was indeed just LORD OF THE FLIES with a tapeworm.

there was a horror element in the fact that there was a lot of graphic gorey imagery, however, it was presented in such a lame pulpy way that it was just. not good. there's no good build up of suspense or atmosphere or dread because the book just keeps mutilating animals and going BOO! SHOCK VALUE! at you. i would not read this again and i would not have been upset if i didn't try again. i MIGHT. consider. this author's other works, if they are from the POV of adults. i don't think the children here were written very well and that's what made me lose interest in the first place; the second the only adult character is killed off, i lost so much interest.

i didn't know that these started at 2006!! i thought the first was in 2012, i'm a fool. so! this covers CASINO ROYALE (2006), QUANTUM OF SOLACE (2008), SKYFALL (2012), SPECTRE (2015) & NO TIME TO DIE (2021) so i'm adding +5 to the stats counter for this one entry.

some of these. admittedly. are better than others! i liked CASINO ROYALE a lot on its own, but that's because i think every iteration of that film is good. it's gotta be like the sixth time they've done this one as a movie. otherwise, SKYFALL also was very good! i kind of liked SPECTRE maybe? but the rest left a little to be desired. i dont know if i like an overarching plot connecting james bond films, i'm very used to being able to turn one on watching it standalone.

i'm replaying this once again because it's easily one of my favourite things to revisit when i kind of just want to be miserable, yknow? & i'm on a quest to 100% a bunch of my games on steam.

this is a beautiful psychological horror rpg disguised as a cutesy little adventure game. it is a deeply touching story about trauma and grief, very much an all time favourite of mine. i love media that's about childhood friends going through The Horrors and this game has that in more than one way, AND has a beautiful soundtrack that is my go-to background noise (my fav track is easily remember to be patient, not only because it's beautiful but because i adore the area it plays in).

i think this game really speaks to me because it gives me a lot of nostalgia for my own childhood; my childhood best friends and i were a group of four and were so inseperable that any time one of us showed up anywhere without the rest in tow, the first thing people would do is ask "where's the rest of you?". unfortunately something happened, disrupted our lives, and we all drifted apart and scattered. it has been over a decade since i spoke to any of them. it was simpler and easier and nothing in your life will ever be like the bonds you had when you were 12, and this is one of my favourite themes in the game - though it is mostly about facing your mistakes head on and enduring consequences.