Coffee at Leblanc

 I was around when the Pokémon craze hit in the late 90s. I started with Pokémon Red and Blue and the first anime series in 1998. Trading cards, the Missing No. glitch, how to find Mew, I was there for all of it. Now with nine generations the brand has gone through ups and down and is actually the highest selling brand on the planet. I'm not sure how. It must be more than games because their game sells doesn't facilitate that kind of status. In other words Pokémon is huge and it's been a big part of my life. I dropped off of the series after gen 2 and later missed it in 2011/2012 and tried Emerald . While I had fun with it, it didn't convince me to get back into it not until I saw a forum post that detailed the history of all the current mons and it made me hype to go back into it and I started with Soul Silver and I went on from there. I had a similar relationship with hip-hop. I grew up in the 90s at the peak of the genre and during the late 2000s like 2007 I started...

I know there's a lot of anime out there, but I feel like Carole & Tuesday doesn't get enough love out there. Shinichiro Watanabe, the creator of Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo is at the helm of this one so it's no wonder that the show is so damn good. What makes Carole & Tuesday so good is the energy it exudes. It's hard to describe quite the feeling it gives me, but I think heartwarming is the most apt. Seeing these two girls struggle to become professional musicians gets you invested in these characters when they finally have a moment of success. This anime came out three years ago so I think it's safe to talk about spoilers so I'm warning those now who haven't seen it. *SPOILERS AHEAD!* The two titular characters are very different, but compliment one another. Carole is hardheaded, brash, and kind. Tuesday is reserved and quiet, but both girls show a lot of determination. The pair's styles are also different: Carole dresses casually whi...

  I've been playing video games for a very very long time now and one of the things that has been bugging me in my adulthood is the lack of afro-centric hairstyles in video games. I play a lot of RPGs and these games often have character creation and customization. As a creative I love any game that gives me freedom to express myself. I love designing the look and the playstyle of my characters. It's just frustrating that my options are so limited when it comes to making a character that looks black and the most egregious part is the lack of hair options. If the title does possess any black hairstyles it's going to be a Party City looking-ass afro, cornrows with no hangtime, and maybe some locs. I would count the low cut, but it's really just a buzz cut. The Grand Theft Auto games is one of the few games I recall that had a good amount, specifically San Andreas since most of Franklin's options in V were just variations of fades and Cesars, but it really shouldn...

  Today marks the second annual Black Fae Day. What is Black Fae Day? Black Fae Day is a celebration of representation and diversity in the fantasy genre. The high fantasy genre has taken pop culture status in the past few decades due to properties like Dungeons & Dragons , Final Fantasy, Lord of the Rings , Harry Potter , and Game of Thrones . The holiday was created by Jasmine Le Fleur, Twitter handle @JupiterJazz, as a way to highlight black faces, creators, and fans of these mystical tales.  Black Fae Day was on May 8th last year where cosplayers took off with it, getting it to trend on #2 on Twitter last year on the holiday.  Hundreds of black women and men alike around the globe dressed up like faeries and posted their photos across social media. Some even took going beyond having dedicated photoshoots, picnics, and parties for Black Fae Day. Today, I would like to highlight some of the cosplayers who have dressed up for the day: Firaga Fox is a big gamer with...

  So I had the pleasure of watching Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness last night and I have thoughts. I remember seeing the first trailer that was tagged in the end credits of Spider-Man: No Way Home and was ostensibly hype, but reasonably so. I never had my expectations up too high and in recent years I prefer knowing as little as possible about movies so I don't get wrapped up in the speculations and theories and I'm glad I only watched that initial trailer. Warning ahead, I'm going to talk about spoilers in this. I do think I can favorably do a non-spoiler review, but I'm so itching to talk about the details about this movie and I don't think I'll have much time to go back and do a separate spoiler review so here it is. *SPOILERS AHEAD! SPOILERS AHEAD! SPOILERS AHEAD! SPOILERS AHEAD! *     I enjoyed this movie a lot! I really liked this movie. Multiverse of Madness provided the amount of weird, magic, and craziness I wanted. This movie takes plac...

  As I walked through the city I ran into this café doubled as a bookstore. Inside I checked the menu, but first scoured the contents of their book section. I'm not sure what inspired this that day, but I had a compulsion to support black authors in that moment. I saw Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi on a shelf, I book I thought I bought a year ago and on top of the shelf in a display, This Poison Heart by Kalynn Bayron. It's been a while since I saw a book cover this attractive. I picked up Children of Blood and Bone and then I examined This Poison Heart . The colors were vibrant and had a painterly feel to them. The cover felt three dimensional as the young brown woman on the cover took the forefront with the trees blurred giving the image a sense of distance and depth. This was all accompanied by gold raised lettering of the book's title. The back cover was almost as unique. It had the same painterly feel as the front with the blurred out foliage in the dist...