A Self-Proclaimed Dreamer

      Merry Christmas, everyone! I'm Jonathan, and today I'll be touching on an extremely important topic from my childhood, Christmas TV specials. As a kid, there was nothing that I liked more than December, not just because of Christmas, but also my birthday. People always asked if I hated having my birthday a week before Christmas because it would always be overshadowed, but I never thought of it that way. It's the only birthday I've ever had, and it certainly seems fine to me. Christmas has always been an incredibly special time for me, even if I'm not completely capable of telling you why that is. There's something just so warm and sentimental about spending the season with family, relaxing, and waking up on Christmas morning at 5 A.M. and rushing down the stairs. My parents were never too fond of that time, so my brother and I would watch the Christmas specials on Nickelodeon that would typically start really early that morning while we waited for them to ...

     Hey there, friends! I'm Jonathan, and today is my birthday. As such, I'm going to deviate from my schedule a little bit with this week's post as well as next week's, as that will be Christmas, but after that you can expect the same content from me as you normally would. I'm just going to talk candidly about my experiences here from this past year, and some of my overall inspiration for what I've been putting together on this blog, as well as some future aspirations. It's really weird for me to talk about myself in the same detail that I talk about theme parks or video games, so this will probably be a shorter post than most are, but I'll do my best!      I'm going to be real here, 2020 has been a really off year for everyone. So many cancelled plans, so many friends missed, so many times that we've all said, "I can't wait until we're able to see each other in person again." Truly, it's been a bad year for so many people...

      Welcome back to my mini series on the Magic Kingdom, friends! For those of you that missed my first post about it, you can look back at the post from two weeks ago. In that post I gave a brief overview of the park as a whole, and then went more into detail about Fantasyland, one of the themed lands that comprise the park. For a quick recap, Adventureland has pirates and jungles, Frontierland has cowboys and yeehaw, Liberty Square has Presidents and spooks, Fantasyland has magic, and Main Street USA has shops and good old fashioned Americana. What about Tomorrowland? Why, dear friends, that's what we'll be talking about today!                                      Space Mountain, the busiest attraction in Tomorrowland     Tomorrowland has always been considered the strangest idea of the themed lands, as the idea is constant progress. The issue with this area is tha...

    Kingdom Hearts has always been a series to focus on the story, even when that story is confusing to say the least. Kingdom Hearts 3 took a definite step in a simpler direction, with the main plot resolution of that game taking place in the final hours, and this most recent game, Melody of Memory , takes that a step further as the only new plot here takes place in the last 10-20 minutes of this 10 hour or so game. I don't mean this in a bad way, it's clear that this game is a celebration of Kingdom Hearts as a whole series, and the sound track leads to some nostalgic and fun times. This title really plays nothing like the rest of the franchise other than a few rhythm based mini-games, but that is certainly not a bad thing. Music of Memory      I truly went into this game expecting a whole lot of exposition dumped on me as soon as I booted it up, but instead it just took me into a rhythm level of "Simple and Clean," the theme song of the original Kingdom He...

      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 t...