Well… I only happened to take a few film courses during my stint in university that, to my surprise (and endless enjoyment for my inner nerd), covered anime. But since Alison got the geek ball for anime classics, giants, and the in-betweens rolling, I couldn’t help but continue the trend. So maybe I should amend the title to Anime from Someone Who’s a Part-Time Expert (Sort Of). Buckle in, because the nerdery is about to get nerdier.
Continue reading
Before I ended up at the library, I had my heart set on the art world (as you might have already gathered from reading some of my previous posts). Now, why is this relevant in the month of June, the month of all things rainbow, glitter, and Pride? Well, to answer that question, we have to take a stroll down memory lane.
You see, in my attempts to get my foot in the door of the monolith that is the modern arts industry, I spent a lot of my time volunteering, and I do mean a lot. There were art fairs, book fairs, a full week spent tying up tiny pieces of dried glue fingerprints to basically invisible pieces of fish wire for Nuit Blanche, and, somehow, lending a helping hand to the admin of Luminato. Which meant that, during the summertime theatre-fest, I was able to treat myself to a handful of shows as thanks for volunteering, and that also meant I had more options than I knew what to do with. So, as is the case with too many things and not enough time, I waited until some tickets were essentially thrown into my lap. Tickets for something called RIOT. As is the way with a lot of things that are thrown into your lap, and in the spirit of not looking a gift horse in the mouth, I didn’t read the description of the show, shrugged my shoulders, and went into it completely blind. That, my friends, is how I accidentally took myself to my first drag show.
Continue reading
For this month’s post, we’re going to need some context. You see, my siblings and I are big gamers (though you might have already guessed that from some of my previous posts). The end of this month also happens to be my brother’s birthday, and because ribbing my siblings on the internet is part of the job of Big Sister, I can honestly say it’s always been a struggle to find something to do to celebrate his next trip around the sun. But, as the planets have mysteriously aligned for this singular point in time, he actually found what he wanted to do before we had to start bothering him about it.
Now that my obligatory teasing is out of the way, back to the first part. The thing my brother wants to do to ring in his next year is to go see Backrooms. It’s a stacked cast horror film based on a short YouTube video posted by the then sixteen-year-old director, inspired by an anonymous forum post that escaped into the wider internet. Yeah. Quite the rabbit hole. It escaped so far that there’s even a video game adaptation of it, which is crazy to think about when all the original post was, was of an unsettling, empty yellow hallway with an equally unsettling short story about blipping through reality (turns out it was just a well-composed photograph of an under-renovation Wisconsin store, though. The more you know). But when my brother first showed any of this to me, I had barely an idea of what it was. I looked at the movie trailer, the game trailer, and part of the Wikipedia page and thought, “wait… isn’t this just House of Leaves?”
Continue reading