Click somethin on the left to see what I have to say about it (assuming I've something to say).

My star system isn't a traditional x/5 scoring system. It's not linear or objective, and a 5 isn't necessarily better than a 4 even in my own opinion.

5 is something that I love. That doesn't mean it's good, just special. My favorites.
4 is very good. Generally recommended.
3 is neutral to good. I enjoyed it, but I'm not a particularly critical person.
2 is bad. Not much media really leaves me thinking this. I'd like to think it's because I don't give the bad stuff my time.
1 is absolutely terrible. I can't think of an example of a 1, maybe because I probably wouldn't even finish it.

Stars are also relative. Like, the Pokémon series as a whole is a 5. Shining Pearl's only getting a 3, but I still played it for 95 hours.

i'm 19, and i never fuckin learned how to read

Okay, so, I Can read. In fact, my mother made a point of teaching me and my younger sibling how to read before we started school because the public school system failed our elder sister in that regard. (She is now an english teacher in spite of this.) Our mother used to have a deal with us where she would pay us for each book we read over the summer so we'd have our own money on our end of summer camping trip. (We were not an allowance family.)

My mother and siblings are all avid readers, I would say. I am Not. This has always been true. I was, and still am, the Gaymer of the bunch, as opposed to being a Reader. (The two genders.) These things, obviously, are not mutually exclusive, but I do actually think video games being such a large part of my life has always been a big part of why I don't read so much. They both take up so much time and I'm generally gonna choose to spend my time on games given the option.

I think, also, I'm not very good at reading. Obviously it's a skill I haven't practiced extensively, so this makes sense, but I don't read particularly quickly, or efficiently. I also can't read for shit if anything else is happening. I don't get how people do, honestly.

All this to say that the only book I've read this year is Good Omens. And the only books I read last year were Cirque Du Freak (which I read as a kid (and which hardly counts as the 12 books it technically is)). And I dont think I read a single book the year before that. I've been meaning to reread A Series of Unfortunate Events (which I loved as a kid) before I watch the netflix series (so for like 5 years) and I still haven't gotten around to it. I don't expect the "Other" category to grow quickly.

To keep the sidebar neat, I'm gonna put stuff I wanna rate but not talk about in here.

Games

• -

TV

• Barbie

  ★★★★☆

• Insidious(s)

  ★★★☆☆

• Riverdale

  ★★★☆☆

• No One Will Save You

  ★★★☆☆

• The Menu

  ★★★★☆

• What We Do In The Shadows

  ★★★★★

• Our Flag Means Death

  ★★★★★

• The Fall of the House of Usher

  ★★★★☆

• Slotherhouse

  ★★★★☆

• Practical Magic

  ★★★★☆

• Centaurworld

  ★★★★★

• Bob's Burgers

  ★★★★★

• Dungeon Meshi

  ★★★★☆

Other

• -

Pokémon ★★★★★

I mean, I have a whole ass website about Pokémon. But I will put something here eventually.

Scarlet ★★★★☆

I think Scarlet's great, despite any technical issues, and the fact that raids Suck. It's not perfect by any means but I enjoyed the story very much and I would die for Arven and my motorcycle dog. Teal Mask is good too. Looking forward to DLC part 2.

The Legend of Zelda ★★★★★

Wind Waker is my favorite Zelda game, but BOTW & TOTK are (collectively, I don't see much use in seperating them) the best one, objectively.

Breath of the Wild ★★★★★

I got BOTW at launch (for the Wii U) and, as expected, spent the next two weeks doing nothing else. By the time I put it down I had 180 hours in it. (I decided to get every shrine before I went to fight Ganon.) When I got a Switch I got BOTW again and I've put another 250+ hours into it since then. I still don't consider myself done. I love all the Zeldas for what they are but this is maybe the first time that one has lived up to the dream of Zelda 1.

Tears of the Kingdom ★★★★★

250 hours in and I still haven't got all the shrines (though I have allowed myself to beat the game first this time). I'm taking a break but not done with it by any means. I love this game where it's just BOTW again and I love it where it's new.

Overwatch ★★★★☆

Overwatch has its own page.

The Muppets ★★★★★

muppet shrine someday

The Muppet Christmas Carol ★★★★★

This is both the best Muppet movie and the best Christmas movie. It was also, as a child, my only non-Sesame street Muppet exposure. (I know we had Treasure Island on vhs but I don't recall ever watching it.)

The Haunting (1999) ★★★★★

see all Hauntings

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson but it's a movie that she probably wouldn't approve of. A movie that is Objectively worse than the Netflix series, and, I've been told, the book. But man do I love it. And I love Lili Taylor (chicken or egg, who knows). It's such a good dumb gay movie and it's perfect for bedtime. (That's canon gay, for the record.)

The Haunting of Hill House (2018) ★★★★☆

see all Hauntings

Man this show is good. The bent neck lady? Incredible.

I dunno why they aquired the rights to the book if they were just gonna ignore it but it's a good show on it's own merit.

Into The Woods ★★★★★

(Disney's Into the Woods gets 2 stars for the record, but I need not sully the list with it. If that's all you've seen of Into the Woods I highly recommend finding the good version.)

I am referring specifically to American Playhouse's 1991 Into the Woods, which featured the original Broadway cast. It's just filming a stage, which is, in my opinion, the form that all theater should come in. I love musicals but I think this may be my favorite one. The music, the wordplay, the fairytale nonsense, Bernadette Peters, what's not to love?

Etrian Odyssey 4 ★★★☆☆

A dungeon crawler with jrpg-style combat and also cartography. You draw your map on the DS touch screen while you explore. See, I don't love jrpgs, generally. (Pokémon and Tales are two of my favorite series, but don't @ me about this.) But apparently I do love cartography. This game hasn't fallen into the jrpg trap of making random battles trivially easy so you can just spam through them and they add no gameplay, but I kinda wish they had so I could get back to mapmaking quicker. The character progression/team building is also working for me, but I'm here for the maps.

Spider-Verse Trilogy ★★★★★

see all Spider-Man

I can not overstate how beautiful these movies are. This is precisely what animation should be doing (fuck disney 3d). And I love seeing echoes of it everywhere. (For the record I don't mean all animation should emulate Spider-Verse, I mean it should do something cool. Take advantage of the medium.) If these movies were ugly I would still enjoy them, but holy crap I love to look at them. Cannot wait for the third.

Spider-Man (PS4) ★★★★★

see all Spider-Man

Inspired by Across the Spider-Verse I finally went back and got my last two achievements (play ng+ on hard) to 100% this, and man this game is good. I wouldn't say Spider-Man is my favorite superhero (it's probably Batman), but I do think he is objectively the coolest. No one comes close to web slinging for sheer style. And this game is great at letting you feel cool. I have milked this game of all its content but I keep wanting to just swing around some more. Can't wait til I get a chance to get Miles' game.

Batman: Arkham ★★★★★

see all Batman

Arkham Asylum was the first ever good Batman game! (Not the first one I played extensively.) Also, according to most developers since, apparently, the first good third person action game control scheme. (But hey, they're right, it's good.) I've been meaning to get back into the Arkham games, I bought them all at launch but never played Origins or Knight.

Arkham Asylum ★★★★★

I've now 100%ed Asylum at least twice (might be thrice). I love this game for what it is, but I almost wish they had leaned more into the metroidvania of it all. Also, this might be a bit of a hot take but I remain a Joker stan. Mark Hamill's at least.

(For the record, I shut my xbox down in a panic the first time Scarecrow glitched the screen. Twice. So good job and also fuck you, I guess.)

Arkham City ★★★★★

Arkham City is about as good a sequel as you can ask for, maybe? Did it need to be that much bigger than Asylum? No, but I don't think it suffers for it either. But, I wish not being Batman was cooler. We see so little of Catwoman in the story, and Robin and Nightwing don't do much to feel different in combat. I might be asking too much here, I know it's just DLC. And I haven't delved too deeply into their challenges yet, so maybe I'll prove myself wrong. I deleted the game for space on my pc instead of finishing 100%ing it. So.

The Lego Batman Movie ★★★★★

see all Batman

While I'm on the topic of Batman, this is unironically the best Batman movie. I'll probably have more to say about it the next time I watch it.

Good Omens ★★★★★

An angel and a demon are in love. Also armageddon happens.

I love this show so much that it drove me to walk to the library, and when they didn't have it, buy my own copy of the book, and then actually read it, each a more monumental feat than the last. Perhaps more precisely, season 2 did this. I watched season 1 when it came out. And I liked it a lot. But man season 2 happened and I don't know how to be normal about it anymore.

i'm gonna make a shrine i think

The Book ★★★★☆

Armageddon happens. Also an angel and a demon are in love.

I like this book. I like the way it talks to you. But it is far inferior to the show in my opinion. (I fully expected to feel this way about it.) It is not nearly as much about Crowley and Aziraphale, which of course is why I'm here. My copy of the book is about 500 pages. There are literally 130 pages in the middle where all we get of the boys is checkups on Aziraphale's cocoa (it's cold) totaling about 4 pages. And I get it. The book isn't About Them so much. But man I spent all 130 pages (which were good and fun) missing them.

The book occasionally makes me "hmmm" in ways that Neil Gaiman had the good sense not to emulate 30 years later, but I think Aziraphale should've been called a faggot in the show too, frankly. Perhaps not by a random tween, but Crowley? Jim? The angel himself?

Tunic ★★★★★

There are no real spoilers here but I seriously recommend going into this game as blind as possible and I also seriously recommend playing it to anyone who's willing put the effort into a game that says "it's dangerous to go alone" and means it.

A housemate got a month of gamepass to play Starfield so I took the opportunity to finally play this. I knew as soon as I saw the first picture of the little Link fox that I would love this game. But I didn't realize just how much, or even, exactly, what the game was. I didn't even know that the game had you collecting pages of a manual very much reminiscent of Zelda 1's until very recently (apparently I never bothered to look at the Steam page). I certainly wasn't expecting it to remind me so much of Dark Souls. (Though I'm not so surprised, Dark Souls and Zelda 1 have a lot in common.)

Sure, it has surface stuff in common, dropping money where you die etc, and some of the boss fights held me up for a while. But I don't love Dark Souls because I enjoy losing to a boss for an hour. They're both, imo, about exploration. They're games that set you loose in the world with little to no direction or even explanation of the mechanics, and just expect you to flail a bit until something clicks. And man I love that about them. (For the record I think Tunic is much better at this than Dark Souls. Tunic is explicitly About this. It feels more intentional and polished in this regard and is better at both withholding and giving information. It's also much less punishing than Dark Souls, if that's not your thing.)

This game is beautiful and sweet and full of secrets and everytime you figure out something new is incredible. The manual is mostly not in English (English based but using it's own alphabet) and I'm thinking of trying to translate it myself. (The internet has already done this successfully. It's just enrichment.) I can pick out some words but I fear figuring out how they break down into an alphabet may be beyond me. But like, that's how much I love this game. I ran out of secrets to find so I'm turning to cryptography.

They sell a physical copy of the manual and I will have it someday. It's gorgeous. But seriously do not look up pictures of the manual if you're ever gonna play this game.

Skinamarink ★★★☆☆

I love it when media commits to the bit. In this case the bit is staring at walls.

A polarizing movie, people seem to either think it's terrifying or terribly boring. I commited to watching this without distraction, but I wasn't scared. The movie only successfully built tension for me, like, twice, and even then, not much (though I may have felt different if I'd watched it alone). But I was never bored, either. 100 minutes of shots of legos on the carpet and staticky TV and I was generally intrigued. I always wanna Know, not that we ever really find out.

Coraline ★★★★★

I went into Coraline the first time knowing Nothing. I just love stop motion so I decided to watch it. I remember watching the opening and thinking, "I can't wait to meet this cute robot who loves their dolls."

(I've also read Coraline on account of it's short and I love the movie. If I had opinions on it, I don't remember them.)

The Office ★★★★★

Despite its popularity, I wasn't into The Office when it was airing. I'd caught a snippet here or there on tv but I'm not sure I'd even watched a full episode. Wasn't interested, I guess.

I later came to realize that there was no doubt I would love the show. 9 seasons of these bozos, there's no way I wouldn't fall in love with them. But I continued putting it off (it's what I do).

I finally watched it and. Season 1 sucks. I was prepared for that, willing to see it through. And then season 2 episode 1, suddenly it's The Office. Suddenly it's fuckin great.

Michael is my favorite part of the show and when he leaves the show suffers. Like, of course it does, but especially, I think, because they try to replace him (and poorly)? They put new weirdos in management in an attempt to carry on his antics but they're assholes. I mean, the (lowercase) office canonically works best post-Michael without a manager. I think the show just gets too hung up on his absence.

Nevertheless I enjoyed the last two seasons moment to moment (despite season 9's attempted character assassination of both Jim and Andy). And I got the only thing I really wanted from them, which was Michael in the finale.

Scream ★★★★★

Scream is my favorite slasher series. Not that I'm a huge fan of slashers. Do I think Scream is great horror? No, probably not. But fuck if I don't love watching Sid, Gale, and Dewey become a family. For precisely that reason I don't have a favorite Scream movie. I don't personally think it's worth looking at them as less than a saga.

Scooby-Doo ★★★★★

Ghoul School ★★★☆☆

I am always surprised by how long this movie is. But I love all these little lesbians.

Zombie Island ★★★★★

Best Scooby movie? Simone is a milf.

Witch's Ghost ★★★★★

Also in the running for best Scooby movie. Tim Curry is a dilf.

The Scooby-Doo Project ★★★★★

Blair Witch ripoff orignally aired as bumpers during a marathon. Its weird and the gang's a bit antagonistic for my taste but it's worth watching if you haven't.

Rune Factory 4 ★★★★★

I got rf4 on a whim to have a chill 3ds game to play in bed. I didn't expect it to have much staying power but I quickly realized it is, in my opinion, the best farming game I've played? Plus I instantly fell in love with Venti so I was hooked. (Let me marry the dragon you cowards.)

It has a weird amount of obscure depth in the mechanics but still feels more accessible? forgiving? than, say, Stardew Valley. It's less focused than SV, I think, but manages to balance everything well, imo. Plus it has an actual plot and I think that helped me get (and stay) into it.

Sonic The Hedgehog ★★★★★

I love Sonic a lot and I will make a shrine about it. For now though:

Sonic Frontiers ★★★★★

I think, this is maybe the best Sonic game since the Adventures. (Which maybe says more about my taste in Sonic games than it does the quality of these games. (I also haven't played a lot of the games between them yet.)) I 100%ed it (still working on 100%ing the dlc) and it's got all the Sonic jank and frustration and I love this game.

Minecraft ★★★★★

I bought Minecraft back when it was still owned by N*tch. My relationship with it since has been kinda on again off again, I guess, which is to say that I go Hard on it for a few days or a week or two and then I don't play it for months or even years. I'm in an On rn. (Well, I was when I wrote this but I'm not at time of posting. But I'm considering this a smaller pause so far.)

When I'm playing Minecraft, I am Playing Minecraft. It consumes my waking hours (and, as is true of many games, my sleeping ones as well, sometimes). I've put hundreds of hours into the game, playing on survival mostly. (Though I have on occassion thought up terrrible and inevitably abandoned projects to build in creative (most notably my attempt at making Zelda 1).) That said, I've never been to the End, and only very recently took my first steps into the Nether.

Elf ★★★☆☆

I've seen Elf a few times without ever retaining any of it. I don't consider myself to have strong opinions on it. But on my most recent watch I've realized I do have a strong opinion on Buddy himself, and that is that I am in love with him.

Bluey ★★★★★

I enjoy a great deal of media for children (though it is usually aimed at older children than this); intended audience is never gonna stop me from loving something. And holy crap do I love Bluey. Everyone in this family is first and foremost commited to 1) each other, and 2) the bit. I love them.

Frozen ★★★★★

Frozen came out when I had just started college and had, thanks to leftover student loans, a good amount of free money to spend. So when I fell in love with it the first time, I went and saw it in theaters at least 3 more times. (And roped/bribed my sibling into joining me in this endeavour.) I love them both and they're probably my favorite Disney movies (rip Lion King). I will never not be in love with Let It Go.

Palia ★★★☆☆

A housemate said "We should play Palia," and I said, "Ew no I hate MMOs. (And I don't trust free to play.)" But it's free so I downloaded it anyway. And now I've played it for 200 hours ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ It has a lot of early access jank, which can be Annoying, but it's a good chill farmy type game, and it's pretty good at creating those cool moments you get playing games with strangers. (Watching a dozen randos move as a pack to chop down a grove is good every time.)

Portal ★★★★★

My first exposure to Portal was finding a cover of Still Alive on youtube. I fell deeply in love with the song, of course, and it inspired me to get the games (and by extension, Steam :/). Obviously I am in love with GLaDOS, but also, mechanically, these are incredible games, and despite being puzzle games I keep coming back to them and I enjoy them every time.