A Self-Proclaimed Dreamer

      On October 1, 1971, Five years after the death of the company's founder, Walt Disney, the Florida Project officially opened with one theme park, the Magic Kingdom. This park would go on to be a successful way to begin the new property, and it's still considered by many to be the best park out of the four in Walt Disney World. It's certainly the most iconic as you can hardly think of the parks as a whole without thinking of Cinderella's Castle or Space Mountain, which are both originals from this park. It certainly takes a lot of ideas and attractions from Disneyland, its big sister from across the country, and puts its own spin on things. The Imagineers had much more room to work with, as Magic Kingdom is slightly larger than the original park, with its 107 acres of land vs. Disneyland's 85. This park definitely claims the title of my favorite park, for reasons that I'm excited to get into. I have a lot to tell you about, so instead of going more into the

    In the past few months, the publisher Ubisoft has been undergoing an investigation about reports of sexism and sexual misconduct amongst employees and executives. Among all of the different executives leaving the company in disgrace and constant news coming out of the company, a little nugget came out about the Assassin's Creed series. An executive told the game designers involved in the series something to the effect of, "Gamers don't want to play as a female character." Of course this is hardly the biggest issue of this story, the gross and misogynistic world of video game culture pervades even the best of game developers and it's truly disgraceful that something such as this continues to happen today. On the smaller scale however, there's a big issue with someone in the games industry actually believing that female characters shouldn't be playable, especially someone who is an executive with the power to make this kind of decision. There have been

      In Walt Disney's last few years of life, he was working tirelessly on the ideas for a Florida theme park project, and recorded a video in 1966 detailing an idea which he called the Experimental Prototype Community Of Tomorrow, or EPCOT for short. Though Disney passed away later that year due to lung cancer, he had done a good job of giving the public a little idea of what to expect once the park was completed. The idea that he came forward with was a futuristic community, complete with areas that people would live in, public transportation, and jobs all built in. Epcot wouldn't actually open until 1982, and the vision set forward by Walt wasn't exactly what the company pursued after the founder's passing.                                 (Credit for picture goes to Disney Parks Blog, taken by Mark Willard) EPCOT's Beginnings      EPCOT is an interesting park, and one that was certainly focused on the future, though it wasn't the futuristic society that Walt

      In the Playstation One era, Sony had one very clear poster boy, a character who broke onto the scene with a megaphone yelling outside of the Nintendo headquarters. That's right, I'm of course referring to Crash Bandicoot, the red marsupial from the Wumpa Islands. I was always more of a fan of Spyro the Dragon, Sony's other big mascot, but Crash's weird and challenging combination of 2D and 3D platforming was something that people seemingly couldn't get enough of. Naughty Dog had created an amazing character, an insane bandicoot who moved like Taz from Looney Toons and showed a whole lot of personality despite having to work with the constraints of the PS One's limited polygon count. Spyro also was a great character, though Insomniac Games focused more on exploration than difficult platforming, and Spyro was less animated than Crash, but he was able to talk in complete sentences, allowing for more in-depth storytelling. Both of these icons were great on the