Frozen The Musical is Great, But Needs Tweaking

Aug 25th, 2017 Movies

Growing up, there were times I felt like the black sheep of the family, at least when it came to music. Sure, I played the tuba and performed in the pit and all those other necessary high school activities, but it was never my passion. I couldn’t list off the names of every member of the original London cast of Les Miserable, I didn’t keep…

Gravity – A Self Pub Review

Ah, crap. I’ve missed a week. Up until this post, I’ve kept pace to write a self pub review every two weeks. It turns out that the government changing the partnership filing deadline screwed up my self imposed goal. *Sigh* Now you all know my failure. Ah, well, let’s get to it. This week’s adventure is Gravity: The Gravity Series #1, by A. B. Bloom. I…

The Pillar of Dominance – A YA Self Pub Review

I’ve just finished my fourth book in my Self Pub book review tour, and I’ve come to an important conclusion: Amazon’s book finding system sucks. It really, really sucks. I have the Kindle Unlimited membership, and it seems like all they want to do is upsell me to other books not covered by the subscription. If Scribd had more Self Pub books on its roster,…

The Key To Happiness Isn’t In DreamWorks’ Trolls

Feb 23rd, 2017 Movies, Other

We’re very much in the children’s movie phase of our lives, so we end up watching nearly everything that scores higher than “total crap” on the Rotten Tomato meter. If a movie looks like weird and plotless garble, we may not watch it until we get it free on our T-Mobile Tuesday or as part of our Netflix subscription, but we will end up watching…

Emergence (The Rise of House Iax) – A YA Self Pub Review

When I started reading Emergence (The Rise of House Iax) by Chad Hench, I was in the hospital. Every tenth page the Kindle app would get stuck between two pages, forcing me to restart the app while I growled in rage. All this during busy season, with the world tumbling down around me and the Dungeon Master of the Universe smiling down with sinister eyes, daring…

The Dragon’s Eye Crystal — A MG Self Pub Review

While I was reading this latest Self Pub book, I had a realization: I’ve never read a book set in Canada. I’ve read books in Canada, I’ve read books aboot Canadians, I’ve watched movies based on books that are filmed in Canada but pretend to be somewhere else. Just never any books that actually take place in America’s Northern Neighbor. That changed when I read…

4 Years Trapped In My Mind Palace – A YA Self Pub Review

I read. Quite a bit. But after a fairly amusing tiff between Larry Correia (voted most likely to be assassinated by the Hugo Award committee) and one of those random bloggers on Huffington Post, I realized that I’ve seriously overlooked Self Published book. This isn’t due to any intentional shunning on my part, just that few Self Pub books pop up on my Scribd subscription. I’ve…

Agents, Anxiety, and Writing

Nov 4th, 2016 Books

Anxiety runs in my family. It’s a trait on the Gordon side, passed down along with above average height (which somehow skipped over me) and sitting on the carpet with only one knee up. For example, Grandpa Doug was probably the best-loved high school biology teacher Redding will ever know, entertaining thousands of students over his long years of teaching. His stories are some of…

A Series of Unfortunate Bedtimes

Sep 30th, 2016 Books

Several years ago, I remember commenting to a friend that Finley didn’t get into characters the way most kids do. By that age, I had already memorized every Mario character, GI Joe, Thundercat, and Dino Rider created. Yet Finley never really got invested in any of the brightly colored characters parading across the screen. That eventually changed with Phineas and Ferb and, much more annoyingly,…

Minecraft Bridges Generational Gap

Sep 21st, 2016 Games, Kid Stuff

Back in my day, The Sims was a phenomenon. Everyone was playing the game, from Granny down the street to the teenage basement-dwelling punk. Finally, a game where you could make your avatar do exciting things like. . .go to work, and exercise, and cook dinner, and use the bathroom. Why would you want to run around like some super hero saving the world when you…