Some Thoughts On The Matter

     Hello! This is going to be a shorter blog post, since it's not really about any one  movie in particular, but rather how I engage with all  movies in general. I was recently approached by one of my cousins from Argentina, Agustin, about whether I have a Letterboxd account. For those unfamiliar with Letterboxd, it's a website that serves as a sort of social media for movie reviews, where you can log, rate, and review movies that you've seen recently, and then go through your friends' profiles to see what they've seen and rated as well. While I know quite a few people who use it regularly (this to be expected with so many friends in a prestigious film school), I never really enjoyed using Letterboxd for myself, only having rated a handful of movies that I've watched. But why don't I use it more often?     This question was posed to me by Agustin, and while I've been asked the same before, this was the first time I paused to give it some thought and ...

      Fresh off of the lengthy vacation I had somehow secured for myself, with MLK weekend and a snow week, I was soon forced to confront the fact that one day, I will have to return to my studies at the university. However, there was still one weekend left in my impromptu break, and without wasting this opportunity, me and my friends from Tallahassee decided to take a visit down to Tampa! As for why we chose to comply with a four hour drive down to a random city, we had chosen Tampa because there was a world-famous pirate festival happening this weekend! So, with the promise of drunken fights, crazy parties, and lots of beads, who wouldn't go along with this half-baked plan?     Surprisingly, the drive wasn't as bad as you'd think: with five guys crammed into a small car for hours on end, you'd start to see some problems arise between the passengers. Instead, most of us had fallen asleep through the drive, so there weren't many complaints. With the occasional r...

      Well. To say that this week went in an unexpected direction would be an understatement. Fresh off of my return from Gainesville, I was surprised to see weather alerts for Tallahassee heralding the potential for snowfall on our Florida campus. Pssht. Like that's gonna happen. Even if it did snow, it probably wouldn't even be that much. These are all thoughts that crossed my mind before the Great Snow of 2025 had fallen upon Florida State University, blanketing the ground beneath a veil of frosty white...     But let's start from the beginning of the end. On Tuesday, I woke up excited for the promise of a forecasted snowfall in Tallahassee. In my head, the rational side of my mind reasoned that it would probably be barely visible, and melt before hitting the ground because of the Florida heat. However, my inner child completely ignored those thoughts and was instead consumed by the hope that I would see snow for the second time in my life. Fueled by anticipa...

     " To know your enemy, you must become your enemy."     -Sun Tzu, The Art of War     After a nice, but busy return to schoolwork following winter break, I had already began to yearn for a vacation, perhaps an extra day off to serve as a respite from my scholarly burdens. Of course, I'm joking. As interesting as my classes are this semester, I find myself having a pretty healthy work-life balance between my schoolwork and my free time. My schedule actually tips the scale in favor of free time, since I have every Friday free this semester, meaning every weekend is a three-day weekend!     However, my hunger for entertainment during these large expanses of free time grows with every day, as I have begun to exhaust all chores, games, shows, and activities to do with all of this time. So, when I realized that we would have next Monday off for Martin Luther King Jr. Day (thanks bro), I set my sights on adventure beyond the limits of Tallahassee...

      When you ask most 2000s kids what game they grew up with, you get a variety of answers. Some classics are the LEGO videogames, Call of Duty, and Club Penguin. Some later Gen Z kids would even mention Minecraft or Fortnite when talking about their favorite videogames that they played as they grew up. And while I grew up with all of these games (minus COD, since I was raised in a very anti-violence house), one game I never see mentioned just happens to be one of my all-time favorites: LittleBigPlanet.     The LittleBigPlanet franchise stretches across three main games, and they are all known for their community-created platformer games. While the story mode of these games were really fun, creative, and full of personality, they were not the main appeal of the game. What most people knew LittleBigPlanet for was the near infinite amount of player-made levels, which resulted in LBP feeling like less of a game, and more of a platform for people to explore their ...

    I don't really consider myself a film bro or esteemed movie critic, but it looks like this semester, I'm going to have to tap into my inner Wade and watch a literal ton of movies, since I'm taking two film classes during the spring. The first movie I watched for class so far has been the original Nosferatu (1922)  for my queer horror film genre class. I figured it was a fitting movie to start watching since there was just recently an adaptation of Nosferatu that came out last year, and while I'm unsure on how likely I am to watch the modern version, I was forced to watch the original on a Sunday night, since I had left it until the very last minute before discussing it in class on Monday.     So! To give a brief summary of the movie for those unfamiliar with the story: Thomas Hutter is sent to Transylvania by his real estate agent boss in order to help a new client, Count Orlok, buy a house in Germany. However, upon arriving at Orlok's estate, Thomas realize...

     This will be a shorter blog post than usual, not necessarily because I have little to say about this movie, but because all that can  be said about this film is best explained in shorter terms. For too long, I have held myself to a certain standard about what a "worthy" movie to watch should look like: over 2 hours, nominated for several awards, niche and unknown to 99% of the general public, etc. However, there are some movies that are objectively pretty stupid that I really enjoy (see This Is The End) that seem to break these standards on what's "worth" watching. To celebrate the birthday of a dear friend of mine, me and my buddies watched one of these movies: The Greatest Beer Run Ever.     This movie tells the true story  of a guy called Chickie (played by Zac Efron) who travels to the front lines of the Vietnam War in order to bring his buddies from home some beer, hopefully raising their morale while he searches for his best friend who was d...

    The other day I had been wondering to myself about the watch value of League of Legends games, as some of my friends had been talking about watching an Esports tournament together. While I think it's unlikely that Esports will ever reach the mainstream general appeal other sports (like football) have across generations, it did make me think: could someone in an older generation (Gen X or older) find the same entertainment value watching a game of League as they would watching a game of basketball?     The short answer? Probably not. With most sports, the metrics that answer the question: Who's winning?  are pretty straightforward, typically just measured as points gained from scoring goals, with the team holding the most points by the end of a time limit being the winner. With LoL, it's a little confusing, since while there still is a clearly defined goal to win (destroy the enemy base), there are so many other factors and metrics that can clutter a person's...