12/04/2022

As I turn 18 in a few days, everything in life comes to me in a weird, melancholic way. It's amazing how easy a person's emotions can change, it feels like a switch that you can turn on and off every few hours, if not minutes. I'm afraid of turning 18, I'm not sure why, but it's a feeling I can't begin to explain, and if I try, I easily can get my words confused. It's been a while since I opened up Blogger to make a blog post but I feel comfortable enough to just, type away. About what? I'm not really sure, but it's fun to make a blog post every once in a while. I've had quite the eventful month since I've been away, and to be honest, I don't want to get into it, and I'm glad I never talked about it here. Why, you might ask? Well, in the words of the now neo-nazi Kanye West, I guess we'll never know. I think that Kanye coming out the way he did has got to be, easily, the worst thing that could ever happen, but I don't want to talk about that, it's already upsetting as is to see one of your favorite artists turn out to be terrible, another thing is to go in-depth about how hurt you feel, on top of already terrible emotions you have going on. It feels weird to blog again, I've been busy with watching skate videos instead of movies, I saw this one video, Chomp On This, from 2002 that will forever stick out in my mind. There's a trick in the video where someone jumps over a park bench, but when they jumped over the bench, the board went through both of the armrests, and the dude landed on the board after it went through, it was the coolest thing I think I have ever seen up to that point. I've been having a strange but strong fascination with skate videos to where they're the only thing I watched in all of November, I have some personal favorites I think everyone should watch though, those being Yeah, Right!, Baker 3, Chomp On This, and Bag of Suck. Those are all amazing videos that are worth your time to watch, and they all have my highest recommendation, they're so good. Outside of watching skate videos, I've been pretty dry this last month. I haven't really felt like doing anything I liked, such as watching movies, writing blog posts (as evident), making edits, and most importantly, research. I love doing research a lot, there's so much information out there and I want to learn as much as I can about the things I love the most, it's cathartic consuming information relating to anything you love, such as Godzilla for an example! That's right! Godzilla is always going to find it's way into every single post on this blog, never failed me yet! Unfortunately, I don't have anything interesting information to drop here like I usually would, however I do have something interesting I do wanna mention. I recently was browsing Amazon to buy a movie as I had some money left from receiving a gift card and happen to stumble upon the Amazon page for Kraken Releasing's version of The Return of Godzilla (mentioned as Godzilla 1984 here before) and noticed there was quite the price hike, it was listed as 70 dollars, at first I thought it was a weird pricing as it's possible Kraken Releasing lost the rights to distribute and print the film as it was already like that when I bought it, but I decided to look up the pricing and it turns out that the movie is not only 70 dollars, but it can easily go up to 150 dollars. That's pretty wild, I've never had a Blu-ray release that had a uprise in price after buying it, I mean the closest I've gotten beforehand finding a copy of Go (1998) brand new for 10 dollars while it usually went for 50 - 60 dollars, but for it to happen to my most favorite Godzilla film makes the whole ordeal a lot better too. It feels weird to think about too, I have my hands on a semi-rare Blu-ray release. However, I do still have doubt it's a weird price hike as of right now, but if not, I'd be happy to be the proud owner of Kraken Releasing's Blu-ray release of The Return of Godzilla, quite possible the best Godzilla film to date, if the upcoming 2023 film next year doesn't change that. A lot has happened with Godzilla since I've been gone, most importantly, and the only thing I'll mention in detail at least, is the announcement of the brand new 2023 Godzilla film. On Godzilla day, November 3rd, it was announced there was a new Godzilla film that was set to release next year on Godzilla day 2023. It's cool, and I will definitely see it in theaters when it finds it's way over here to the states. I want to believe that Sony will have a hand with it's distribution but the unfortunate reality is that it will be Crunchyroll. I really do not like Crunchyroll, I'm not exactly sure why but I don't think they're a good company, and the fact they're most likely going to distribute the film once it comes out. You might ask, "Why Crunchyroll?", and to that I answer. Since FUNimation distributed Shin Godzilla back in 2016, I can see Toho using them again, but uh ohm Cruncyroll got it's stupid, crooked little hands on FUNimation earlier this year. So much so that all future Blu-ray releases will have the Crunchyroll logo on it! Ew! That's awful, it feels like an era of time is lost on us, and lost to a streaming agglomerate that's soulless, now with that being said, it's not like FUNimation themselves were soulless, but they were recognizable for what they did, to me they were the company who made pretty bad releases that were overpriced whose price never actually reflected the quality of that release, but the name FUNimation always added a certain charm to it I could never put my finger on, it's a nice touch, and now that it's gone, it feels like a part of history just evaporated in front of my eyes, it's genuinely upsetting to me what's happening, once they start putting that dumb Crunchyroll logo on past releases when they run out of old stock, that's when it'll become clear how dead FUNimation will really be outside of a website that streams anime from time to time. Another thing that happened whilst I was gone has possibly been the WORST thing to happen in my general sphere of life. On November 25th, it was revealed that Chuu had been kicked out of LOONA, as you may know me or this blog, you can tell how much of an impact LOONA has had on me and my overall outlook on life, exposing me to a world of music that means a lot to me, as well much much more. I can't begin to tell you how much of a shock it was to me to read that headline. I remember it clearly as I can, it was 3 in the morning and I was ready to go to bed but I decided to check Twitter to pass time and was scrolling by my feed and I saw the headline "Blockberry Creative expels and removes Chuu from LOONA". I saw this and my heart sank. I was speechless, I genuinely couldn't believe it. I'm not sure what I can say now that hasn't been said before but I do find it peaceful that the company's reasoning was that Chuu was being abusive to staff and then a plethera of people who have worked with Chuu before all came out against the company, and to top it all off, the next day something unbelievable happened. 9 out of 11 of the members left decided to file for injunction so they can exterminate their contracts with them. This is a pretty reasonable response to a situation like that, however, I don't recall a situation like this ever happening in the history of k-pop, it's pretty monumental and kind of historic. The two members who didn't sue for injunction though, ViVi and HyunJin are probably set to file pretty soon, as ViVi is a foreigner it might be harder for her to file a lawsuit due to a bunch of paperwork, and it's suspected that HyunJin is staying by her too, which wouldn't be out of the question for that to happen, and is most likely the case. This all reminded me of the line distribution post I made all the way back in May, and reminded me I should probably go ahead and re-do that post since it's about time to do it anyways, and I was set to do it after their Flip That mini-album released, but got lazy and never did it. It could be next week's post, or the one after that. I want to do a few more posts to get into the swing of things before I do something that deep ever again, and I might do something bigger for it too, however don't count on it. Ever since the Chuu situation, I've been listening to a lot more k-pop and recently found a much higher appreciation for Red Velvet, I've talked about them before but they're really good. They're probably the best k-pop group musically speaking, but I can make a whole other post ranting about how good they are, if I wanted to at least. That gives me an idea actually, so be on the look out for that in the upcoming posts... Their most recent comeback though, Birthday, is a great release and one of my favorites, and the recent music video is possibly their best one to date. I picked up a film earlier today, Versus from 2000, I finally stopped by a used book store I haven't visited since May this year and decided to look around and noticed this really cool steelbook that was pretty heavy so I decided to get it. It's a pretty good release as well, a 3 disc set where 2 of the 3 discs are just jammed pack with special features, and on top of that, the same director of that also directed Godzilla: Final Wars. It always comes back to Godzilla. Fun fact, today's the 18th anniversary of that film, so that's cool. The movie looks really cool too, I watched a trailer for the Arrow Video release earlier and thought it looked amazing, so I can't wait to watch it when I have the chance to, it looks like I will have a fun time with it when I do watch it. That reminds me that I need to start watching Japanese cinema again, I have a TON of it on my watch list. I also decided to pick up Sonic Origins finally, I've been wanting to play it since it came out but I decided against it as I did not want to pay full price for a set of games I already have played before in what's considered the most definitive so I decided to wait until it was on sale or has a physical release. Unfortunately it does not have a physical release just yet, but it finally became half off so I decided to pick it up and I've been having a really fun time with it, reminds me of how much I really love Sonic, which reminds me to read the comics again actually. Finally having definitive editions of the original Sonic Games on modern consoles is really cool though, Sonic controls best on controllers so having it this way is really, really nice. That's all I have to say for this blog post, I just figured it'd be nice to give a life update about what's been happening and figured it'd be nice to ramble about stuff for a bit too. There's a lot of stuff I didn't mention that happened but that's fine. I'll try to keep this blog as consistent as I can, I have no real excuse for this last month other than I got distracted easily, and even then that's not the best excuse. I'll see you guys in the next post, and I hope you all have a wonderful day. Much love to everyone reading.