Sunshine Blogger Award – Part II

Okay, so when I said tomorrow in the last post, I obviously meant in one week. Easy mistake, but here we are. I was nominated by Red Metal at Extra Life. Thanks for the mention!

1. Have you ever watched a critically acclaimed show only to feel it didn’t live up to the hype?
I may get banned from the Internet for admitting this, but I’ve watched a few episodes of Rick and Morty and just wasn’t into it. I love pretty much everything I’ve seen from Dan Harmon – Community, HarmonQuest, Great Minds with Dan Harmon – but this one just didn’t hook me, despite the plots being fun and clever. I came in late, and maybe the rampant Internet fandom spoiled it for me a bit, who knows.

I’ve heard you need to get six or seven episodes in to ‘really get it’, but I just haven’t been bothered to get that far. I can’t stand the gag of Rick drooling and belching every few words, and apparently that never stops, so I’m not sure I’ll ever get there.

2. After truly getting into the medium and observing the many times film critics failed to see eye-to-eye with fans, I’ve come down to the conclusion that the former faction could stand to improve themselves. How do you think they should go about doing that?
I don’t read a lot of reviews from professional film critics, apart from the one or two sentence blurbs on Rotten Tomatoes, so I’m not really equipped to answer this. I find with reviewers of any medium that unless I follow that writer specifically and have an understanding of their personal preferences and previous opinions, the reviews are only mildly useful. These things are subjective, and a professional review is still just an opinion. There are people whose opinions I generally respect that hate my favourite books or inexplicably love games I can’t stand. That’s why I tend to prefer following weblogs or Twitter accounts rather than reading a one-off game review on Polygon or a movie review from the The Globe and Mail. Knowing where your preferences differ and meet is incredibly useful.

So, I guess my answer would be for them to…quit getting paid and start a weblog? And to maybe give up on faux objectivity and really embrace their own personal voice and opinions.

3. What is the most obscure album in your collection?
I inherited a box of records from my father, all of which I think would safely qualify as obscure, but of the records we’ve bought ourselves, the most obscure would probably be a random Aussie Sing Song record we somehow picked up last year while in Australia. It’s a 1962 album from Slim Dusty and His Bushlanders.

4. What film do you consider “So bad it’s good”?
I remember loving the 1995 Mortal Kombat film when I was a young teen and knowing at the time, on some level, that it really wasn’t a good movie. That theme song, though.

Hackers also came out that year, which was my favourite movie in my teens, and while I would argue that parts of that movie are actually quite good (and the soundtrack is amazing), there are a lot of cringe-worthy scenes, such as any scene featuring Fisher Stevens’ The Plague character.

5. What do you think the ideal length of a game should be?
I love games that are under eight hours. Longer games have their place, for sure, but a streamlined story-based game without any filler is great for me. I understand wanting as much game as you can get for the money you spent, but when you have a backlog as long as mine, that doesn’t really matter. I have a lot of games I want to get through and only so much time.

6. Have you ever cleared a game while travelling abroad?
I usually don’t play games much when I’m travelling for a holiday, but I spent a semester in Austria in university and played some games while there. The only game I actually remember playing all the way through during that time was Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy, which I really enjoyed. Heavy Rain came out a few years later, something I was very excited to play, but I ended up hating that game with every fibre of my being, so I actually haven’t played the last few David Cage games.

7. What is your favorite decade in films?
Probably the 80s. I just have a lot of childhood nostalgia wrapped up in those movies. I spent a lot of time watching the Indiana Jones trilogy, The Goonies, Best of the Best, the John Hughes movies, all of that. It’s a good decade.

8. What game do you feel doesn’t get enough credit?
The first one that came to mind was Tales from the Borderlands. I think a lot of people are burnt out on these Telltale games, with the rate they’ve been making them, but when they come up in conversation, I feel like Tales from the Borderlands doesn’t get as much love as it should. It was an interesting story with great characters, some very cool cinematic scenes, and an absolutely brilliant soundtrack.

9. What lesson do you think film fans could learn from gamers?
This is a tough one. My Twitter feed had been full of adult gamers bickering with each other and whining over which game console is the best lately, so I’m tempted to say ‘absolutely nothing’, but that’s not really fair.

What I would like to see is a more accessable indie scene. Indie games have become a huge part of video games in the last decade, and it’s been such a creative and exciting side to the industry. Many gamers play them almost exclusively. Indie movies have always been a thing, but I feel like unless they somehow become huge, most of us don’t hear about them. Maybe film fans could take a cue from gamers and try to bolster that scene a bit more. Finding a way to make those more readily available to people, and as a result making them more profitable, would be great for the industry, I think.

10. What good work do you feel had a negative impact on its respective medium?
Probably any work that spawned a lot of lesser copycats, which will always happen and isn’t their fault. The Matrix comes to mind and all of the ridiculous uses of the bullet time effect that followed.

11. What bad work do you feel had a positive impact on its respective medium?
I wouldn’t call them bad, but I’ve never personally been a fan of the newer Grand Theft Auto series of games (the first two top-down games were fun). Something about the way the missions are structured just pulls me out of the story, but there’s no denying that GTA III had a major influence on all of the open-world games we enjoy today, many of which I love. So, I guess that counts?

Thanks again to Red Metal for the nomination!

Think of these links as just a list of weblogs I really enjoy. I’ve listed eleven new questions to answer below. If any of you would like to answer them, that’s great, but I get that a lot of webloggers don’t do these tags, or have already done this, and that’s totally cool. A couple of these people may have also stopped posting, but I’m hoping they come back. Also, I think at least a few of these blogs don’t know I exist, so they’ll never see this, but they’re still worth checking out despite that cultural deficiency.

• Silvia Cachia
• Ruthiella Reads
• Bookstooge’s Reviews on the Road
• Nikki @ Book Punks
• Lashaan @ Bookidote
• Savageddt @ Wordaholic Anonymous
• Geoff @ The Oddness of Moving Things
• David @ FanFiAddict
• Paul @ Paul’s Picks
• Food in Books
• Claudia @ Honey From Rock

1. If you could take two authors and mash them into a single author, with their writing styles combined in a cohesive and complementary way, who would you choose?
2. What movie have you watched the most in your life?
3. Has writing reviews for a weblog changed how you view other people’s reviews and opinions, professional or otherwise?
4. Is there an obscure or strange topic that you’ve spent too much time watching on YouTube? For example, I once incomprehensibly lost a week to grocery hauls.
5. What book helped open up an entirely new genre to you? One that sparked an interest and led to you becoming a fan?
6. What is the independent bookstore scene like in your city? Flourishing? Nonexistent?
7. If you could have one character from a novel be your Obi-Wan Kenobi wisdom ghost, ready to pop up and offer some insight in times of need, who would you choose?
8. Is there a specific meal you’ve had, at home or on holiday, that you often think back on with fond memories?
9. What is your favourite film or video game soundtrack?
10. If the last novel you read had a short soundtrack, basically one song per act, what songs would be on it?
11. Every night when you close your eyes to go to sleep, you find yourself in the setting of a novel, and when you go to sleep in that world, you’re back here. You’re living a day at a time in both worlds, can die in either, and will need to eat and bathe there as you would here. Which novel will you wake up in each night?