Happy Birthday Skyrim

I love the Elder Scrolls series of games. When I was in school years ago, a friend of mine had Morrowind, and I loved the design of the game. It managed to feel fantastical and alien at once, and despite the fact that I loathe the game's combat system, it was an experience. As recently as a few months before Skyrim came out, I finally bought and played Oblivion, and while it wasn't as fun, I enjoyed the atmosphere of the central region of the continent of Tamriel, and Cyrodiil became my favorite location in the franchise to date.

However, in Morrowind I mostly ran around exploring Dwemer ruins, and in Oblivion I mostly ran around the woods or Imperial City, or died a lot to Umbra. I never actually got into the stories of the games, or the lore, or the modding community. Skyrim was the game that changed that. Now I love modding other games as well, and I've developed a deep appreciation for the lore of Tamriel, which has become my favorite fantasy world.

At three years old, Skyrim is still a fantastic game with fantastic fan content that I enjoy playing on a regular basis. I plan to start a new play through of the game soon, as a let's play series. Happy birthday, Skyrim, and thanks for being my favorite game.

TV Reviews - Doctor Who 0811 and 0812: Dark Water and Death in Heaven

We already talked about the first part of this episode last week, but what came last week isn't what I would call a review. I'd call it something akin to a summary of points of interest, and interesting those points were. Between the revelation that Missy is the Master, and the startling scene where Clara betrays the Doctor, Dark Water was probably the first really memorable lore episode of the Series. Of course, this week, we will be looking deeper into that episode, and taking a look at the second as well, so we should probably start out be elaborating on some of the points that I made earlier.

Movie Reviews - Big Hero 6

I don't enjoy math, and I don't see the point of it a lot of the time, but even I understand that sometimes the simple application of addition can improve a product or situation exponentially. This movie, which I saw the local premier of earlier tonight, embodies this statement. This movie is almost entirely made up of seemingly unrelated things added together to create something better. Marvel Comics plus Disney Animation Studios equals a brilliant new medium for telling great stories to a broader audience. San Francisco plus Tokyo equals a vibrant, visually interesting story setting. A moving story of dealing with loss plus a really action packed, fun, and funny superhero origin equals Big Hero 6.

 

A Surprise Something Awesome - Astronaut Chris Hadfield's Cover of Space Oddity! From Space!!

Chris Hadfield, one of the few cool Canadians (just kidding, I love you Canada!) did something really cool a while back: he did a cover of David Bowie's Space Oddity.

AwesomeJohn, you ask, what is so cool about that? Loads of people do musical covers, don't they?

Well, yeah, but how many people do you know who have made a music cover in freakin' space?!

And if this weren't enough awesome, there is even more to this story. The reason that this post is titled A Surprise Something Awesome is because no one ever expected to see this video online again. It had been flagged and taken down due to copyright infringement before I could originally blog about it here way back when (I don't remember when exactly it first went up, sorry). This situation seemed permanent, until David Bowie himself saw the video and said, "hey, what are you guys doing flagging that video. It was awesome! Get off that guy's back and let him do awesome stuff."

Okay, maybe I'm paraphrasing a bit, but either way this video is so cool that the original creator of the song has officially endorsed it. How awesome is that?!

The answer is really awesome.

Thank you Mr. Hadfield for being a cool astronaut and making this video, thank you Mr. Bowie for being awesome and letting the video go back up, and thank you Phillip Defranco, AKA Sxephil on YouTube for including the fact that this video had been returned to YouTube in your Today In Awesome segment today (otherwise I wouldn't have known it was back!). And thank you, people of the internet, for existing, giving me a reason to seek out such great videos to share. Check the video out below, and come back later for another Something Awesome.

Doctor Who Series 8 Finale Update

So part one of the Doctor Who Series 8 finale was tonight, and it was pretty cool. It tied up a lot of the loose ends that have been left unraveled through the Missy ending scenes of several episodes since the start of the series, and even revealed the identity of the mysterious character. I will not be reviewing the episode here, but will be waiting for part two and reviewing them together. I will talk about a few interesting things from this episode, however, after the jump. As always, spoilers ahead.