Coffee at Leblanc

   Tokyo Pop  I've been meaning to watch Tokyo Pop for a while now. I actually came across this from a Tumblr post. This tumblr post wasn't anything all that special; it just featured the images of this movie's posters, but the title and the colors from those posters drew me in. I liked the aesthetic of it and the synopsis was intriguing enough so I added it to my watchlist and it became the first film on my Letterboxd watchlist. I finally watched it and I liked it just as I hoped. This film as the description says on IMDB is about an American rock singer who goes to Japan initially to meet up with a friend but she ends up meeting a Japanese singer in a rock band and their lives intertwine. It is an interesting film that leaves you feeling warm at the end. I do miss just how visually pleasing movies used to look. I dig the roughness of this film from the grain and the messiness of some of the sets. The film's budget was never officially released but it said tha...

  So Sonic Origins finally releases today. This title is a compilation package of the 16-bit Sonic games, Sonic the Hedgehog , Sonic the Hedgehog 2 , Sonic CD , and Sonic 3 & Knuckles . For those who never played these titles before or have lost them over the decades this is an ideal package to purchase, but their is a caveat. Some of the music from Sonic 3 has been omitted in this release. Back in the 1990s it was rumored that legendary pop artist Michael Jackson along with keyboardist and musical director Brad Buxer worked on the Sonic 3 soundtrack. It was said that Michael Jackson didn't like how the Sega sound chip sounded and how his tracks were integrated. Subsequent releases of Sonic 3 have replaced some tracks with a prototype version. It's been long speculated by fans that it was because Michael Jackson composed those songs and up until now it was just speculation. Today, Yuji Naka, a former Sonic team lead and the lead programmer for Sonic 3 posted the followi...

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...

So I'm sitting in a coffee shop drawing while listening to some music with my headphones. What am I listening to? Well, lately I've been on a binge of musical genres that were created by the nerd community or music genres that my fellow nerds seem to gravitate towards exclusively. There's future funk, chiptune, lo-fi, nerdcore, slowed & reverb, city pop, J-pop, and K-pop in my library. What makes these forms of music geek music? Well, it's just as I stated. Most of these music genres were either invented by geeks or music that tends to only be listened to by geeks. For some of these the origins are hard to trace, but in the case of chiptune it's quite obvious.  Chiptune derives its sounds from video games and dates back to the 80s when videos game really took off in the commercial space in the arcades and the home. Video games were limited in the sounds they could produce so musicians had to be more creative in their compositions. This lead to a unique sound and...