One of my favorite hosts on YouTube announced he's leaving SourceFed. I got to watch the final seasons of Legend of Korra and the Newsroom, both of which I just started watching this year. Meanwhile, my mom lost a friend and my cousins lost their belongings to thieves. This is also the last entry on the weekly ketchup.
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| Party last Sunday with great friends. Pic c/o Jovan |
The week started with Joe Bereta announcing that the next couple weeks will be his last on SourceFed. I've been following the channel since around 2012. It has been my constant source of entertainment news and of some of the crazy ass news I share on my Facebook. It's gonna be sad to see him go but I wish him well.
As I've mentioned before, I prefer my fantasy in vanilla flavor, so I never really liked the science and technology aspect of Legend of Korra. Unfortunately, it's even more pronounced in the last season, what with all the mechs and all, which kinda makes sense since the enemy here is not just earth-benders but an army of metal-benders. I would've preferred them use metal-bending to power and control their mechs, similar to what the water-benders have done with submarines in The Legend of Aang. I also feel like the stakes weren't as high as they were in the first couple of seasons. I feel like the battle with Vaatu would've been a better series-ender. And that final scene! Where did that come from?! Don't get me wrong: I don't hate it - I just didn't see the build-up to it.
As for the Newsroom, I feel like there's very little in the final season about covering a story (or stories), which kinda bums me out. It's like the personal struggles of the characters were put forward instead, which made the story less compelling for me to watch. I also wasn't a big fan of the sudden marriage proposal from last season and I certainly wasn't a big fan of how they thought to add to that story in their final season. I didn't like that Dev Patel was absent for most of it but I did like that one of the main characters died. It was the ideal context for an ending, I thought. Then again, no matter what I thought of everything else about the show, it's still the dialog that hooks me in. I still wish there were more seasons of the show though!
Meanwhile, one of my mom's oldest and closest friends, someone who I've also had the pleasure of meeting, passed away yesterday after a bout with cancer. My mom helped with her medical finances, so I can just imagine how much her friend's passing must've pained her. I thought: Is this what she's got to look forward to now? Friends dropping by the wayside? Of course, I remembered that "the culling" has already begun in my generation and, as much as it pains us, we have to just accept that it is a part of life - and the best that we can do is simply to live out what time we have with each other the best we can, which should really go without saying, but it does bear reminding.
On Christmas Day, the cousins and their kids and me and my siblings went out of town to this privaate resort in Laguna. It was supposedly a despedida for me, back when everyone thought I was leaving for good, so I didn't have any idea about what they planned to do. I didn't know it was gonna be out of town nor that we were gonna be staying overnight. I kinda felt awkward about the whole thing since I was coming back (this time anyway) and I was having one of those episodes I talked about last week, so I didn't get to enjoy the pool as much as I wanted to. The kids were having the time of their lives, though, which was good enough for me. So all was well - until we were robbed. Two masked men came in through one of the locked doors in the room the women were staying in and took their bags, which had all their phones and money (including the ones I gave as Christmas gifts). My niece, who was awake at the time, managed to scream and alert everyone else, so the robbers had to flee right away, sparing the other rooms, including mine.
I'm really grateful for my niece because if not for her, the robbers would've crept into me and my brother's room and took our stuff, which would've included my spiffy new camera that I'm also bringing on my trip.
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| The family. The morning after the robbery. |
Originally, I had intended for this entry to be the last entry, as the "goodbye" blog as I embark on a new adventure. It would've been a nice ending to this year and this little project of mine, as well as my life here in the country.
Well, pieces don't always fall where they should and here I am leaving on a trip for which I'm still coming back for. To be fair, I am proud of what I've accomplished this year. I did it. I stuck through with blogging bits and pieces of my life every week. More importantly, I stuck through with my crusade to save money and so here I am. Hooray me!
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| Christmas Eve with the orphans |
However, I don't think I'll regret not pushing through with the bigger plan, or at least I'll have to keep convincing myself that: a) I've done it once, I can do it again; and b) My friend only gets married once. Actually, scratch that. I meant I'll probably only be a groomsman once in my life and so I have to be there. It sucks that I bought a ticket that couldn't have been rebooked instead but I'll take what I can get. Life is, after all, too short to spend on regrets.
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| Last night with high school friends Pic c/o Anya |
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| Behind-the-scenes at the pre-nup shoot I helped marshal earlier today. I thought it would be a thematic to end the blog with the reason my story here isn't done yet. |
First, totally agree regarding Korra. A lot of shippers argue that the clues for this relationship were all over the prior seasons/episodes but I didn't feel it was built up sufficiently. I'll concede that Nickelodeon probably had a hand in preventing things from being more direct (and the creators acknowledged that this had not been handled as well as they had hoped) so that automatically limits the foreshadowing. But still, it felt left field.
ReplyDeleteSecond, I've felt similarly about the Newsroom over the years. The first season had a strong focus on the whole news bit, but later seasons got swallowed up by the personal drama. Sad, but it happens.