Micheal Bay's 2014 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Re-Make: Turtles REVEALED?!

***WARNING MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS***

I'm pretty sure everyone is familiar with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and the remake/reboot/re-imagining/whatever Micheal Bay is doing of the 1990 original movie. Or if you weren't familiar with them before last year -- or was it the year before? -- when Bay dared to mention the words "turtles", "not mutants", and "aliens" in the same sentence, then I'm gonna assume you are now thanks to the unholy hell unleashed upon Bay by hundreds of thousands of TMNT fans via the internet. Myself, included ^_^
After Bay later responded to the fans and announced the Turtles would be of alien origins and would indeed be very, very mutated there really hasn't been much news for the movie. Except that Megan Fox is playing April O'Neil, the Shredder is now a white guy, and the Foot Clan is looking more akin to the Japanese yakuza than an army of killer, ninja thieves, but most people like pretend that this just isn't happening.
Although, honestly, the Foot thing is almost forgivable because the yakuza is Japanese, at least, and almost makes sense because they're, like, the largest organized crime unit in the world right now.
Anyway, last week a picture of a quite horrendous-looking TMNT Michelangelo children's costume surfaced on the web as a piece of supposed concept art for the new movie. The image horrified millions of  TMNT fans and left countless others scratching their heads in confusion. How else does one react when you find out the Turtles are gonna look like this? 

Let's be honest, it looks pretty bad. And what's with the bling and stuff? I mean, where would Mikey get this stuff -- Ron Jon's? He lives in a sewer, for crying out loud!
The next day, however, fans were appeased when a new image surfaced. This time the Turtles were depicted using figurines: 

Then even more images were released, so we get a look at the other Turtles.

I'll admit, they look pretty good as far as the whole "realistic Turtles" thing goes. They look very much mutated and turtle-ish. But I'm still having a hard time looking past Donnie's gadget-pack and all the other additional stuff that I guess was just thrown on to the give Turtles more personality. I mean, I know people throw away some pretty cool stuff, but if they've never, ever set foot above ground, then how are they getting this stuff? I know a lot of people like to hate on New Yorkers, but I'm pretty sure they wouldn't be dumb enough to throw high-tech computer gear into the sewer.
That aside, no amount of awesome graphics can make a movie good as far as the story goes, which has been proven again and again by countless Bay haters. If the rest of the movie sucks, then having badass Turtles is sort of a moot point and money down the drain, unfortunately. Whether or not the rest of the movie lives up to the awesomeness of these Turtle figurines, we will just have to wait and see.
Til then, I'm just gonna kick back and enjoy the awesome new TMNT cartoon series that's been airing Nickelodeon and hope for the best. 

Pokemon X Team

Current Team: 

Pokemon Trainer Rika

Braixen

Nickname: Renee

Type: Fire/Psychic

Sex: Female

Level: 22

Attacks: - Flame Charge
- Ember
- Fire Spin
- Psybeam


Reasoning: There really wasn't any reason why I picked Fennekin. Or, at least, not a good one, I admit. Fennekin has been my favorite of the Kalos region starters since day one, though I did waiver a bit when I found out about Delphox. That was mostly because I, personally, saw a very strong resemblance to Renamon and her Digivolutions in Digimon Tamers (AKA Digimon Season Three).
I didn't like Chespin -- or at least its evolutions -- because it wasn't appealing to me as far as appearance goes and honestly, like a lot of other players I did not like its typing or stats at all.
I decided not go with Froakie because, first of all, everyone has Froakie. People just seem to love it and I'm just meh about it as a starter. I did, however, try playing with Froakie as my starter in a previous save and it was cute at first, but then once it evolved, I hated it. I thought its evolutions were, honestly, terrifying. They reminded me of some mutated, demonic version of Kermit frog, especially in Pokemon-Amie and I freaking hated it. I did not want to play the game with that as my starter.
So I stopped playing for a while.
I also think Fennekin and its evolutions has fairly decent stats, granted not as good as Froakie's, but I think once I Super Train it a bit, it will be extremely powerful. I look forward to doing battle, both in-game and competitively, with Renee.

Pidgeotto

Nickname: Jett

Type: Flying/Normal

Sex: Male

Level: 22

Attacks: -Twister
-Gust
-Quick Attack
-Sand Attack

Reasoning: I chose Pidgey to my Flying type in the game because I have a soft for Pidgey and it's evolutions, and I honestly was not interested in the other Flying types. Talonflame seems like it'd be cool to have, I didn't another Fire type, so it got boxed and again, I just really like Pidgey.
It's sort of a tradition. I started playing the Pokemon video games when I was about 12 and my first game was Pokemon Silver. I got it because the Burger King where I lived was having a drawing and was giving them away as a prize, and my grandfather went down and spent the whole day there til he won a copy for me and my brother. It was the only Pokemon videogame I owned for a very long time because we didn't have the money to spend on them and Pidgey was one of the first Pokemon I caught when I played it and it just grew on me.
So I guess it's safe to say, that stats aside, I think Pidgey is freaking awesome.

Floette

Nickname: Flaay

Type: Fairy

Sex: Female

Level: 22

Attacks: -Tackle
-Wish
-Fairy Wind
-Razor Leaf

Reasoning: I wanted Flabebe in my party because, unlike a lot of players that I know, I am a fan of the Fairy types and, honestly, I would be surprised if I didn't run into some Dragon Types on my way to the Pokemon League or elsewhere, for that matter.
I had Swirlix as my Fairy type the very first time I played Pokemon X and I always felt really bad because according to Dexio and Sina, Flabebe is the Fairy type to get. I had opted to go with Swirlix, though, because all Flabebe really seemed to learn was Grass type moves.
This time around, though, I decided to look at it from a different point of view. Flabebe could learn Grass moves and Fairy types, which in my mind meant it had the potential to be very badass -- plus, I wouldn't need to capture a Grass type. Two birds, one stone.


Honedge

Nickname: Claymore

Type: Steel/Ghost

Sex: Female

Level: 22

Attacks: -Tackle
-Swords Dance
-Shadow Sneak
-Aerial Ace

Reasoning: First of all, it's an Excalibur reference, so if that's not awesome, I don't know what is.
Second, it's stats are awesome and it is literally one of the only good Metal types available in Kalos.

Tyrunt

Nickname: Taichi

Type: Rock/Dragon

Sex: Male

Level: 20

Attacks: -Tackle
-Stealth Rock
-Bite
-Strength

Reasoning: Not gonna lie, Tyrunt was not totally part of my original Pokemon X dream-team. Then I booted up the game the other day and realized NONE of my Pokemon could learn the HM Strength.
I Googled it and it turns out, there aren't that many Generation 6 Pokemon that can learn that move and aside from Pidgeotto, I'm trying to keep my team pretty Gen. 6 exclusive this time around. After thinking it over and discussing strategies with my husband, I decided that my best bet would be to remove Furfrou from my party and replace him with my Tyrunt who could learn the move. It makes me really sad that I had to remove Furfrou from my party because I had become really attached to her, but I know that overall Tyrunt is going to contribute more to my party when it comes to battle.

Becoming A Stereotype?

I'm sure we've all seen the movies where there's this one little kid, usually a boy. He wears big glasses and suspenders, has a stuffed up nose, complains about being sick a lot, and when he opens his bedside table drawer, there's nothing but asthma inhalers inside of it.  When we saw this on TV, we couldn't help but think or say aloud, "It's gotta suck to be that kid," and we all knew we would never want to be like to him.
I started to feel like that kid in the movies when I was nine years old and my eye doctor told my mother I needed bifocals. Bifocals -- on a nine-year-old girl! I was so upset, I burst into tears in the doctors' office and said, "Normal kids don't need bifocals. That's something Grandpa should be wearing!"
It wasn't just that, though. I knew that the other kids at my school would never understand. They already didn't. I had spent the entire third grade, being called four-eyes and watching them make fun of the way I walk because I'd had an operation done two years earlier to correct my clubfoot. Regular glasses were bad enough. I knew that wearing bifocals would only make things worse.
When I went back to school, I found myself subjected to a lot of curious questions from the children who bullied me regularly. "Why is there a line on your glasses?" they asked and so, I did my best to explain the situation. I told them the line was there because the glasses were bifocals, which meant it was made of two different lenses because the doctor said I was far and near-sighted in both eyes. Or, at least, that's how it'd been explained to me.
The kids said the same thing I had back at the doctors' office, "That sounds like something for an old person."
Eventually, though, the kids got over the glasses, and I started to feel less like the kid in the movie. Until around sixth grade, that is.
I knew there had to be something wrong with me. I was almost always sick, no matter what time of the year it was and I spent a lot of my time being depressed. I would cry at home and at school. Sometimes for no reason, and no one ever asked why or how come. But by middle school, I was spending a lot of time in the school psychiatrist's office and when they asked me what was wrong, I told them, "There's something wrong with me. I think I'm sick."
When they asked me why I never talked to anyone or had any friends, I said, "There's no point in trying to make friends. They're just going to make fun of me."
That was all I knew, so it was all I could tell them. Back then, I didn't know about social anxiety or how the mind worked. I did know, though, that not all of the bad feelings could have come from being bullied. Lots of kids were bullied and went on to be happy and sometimes even popular. So even if that was a part of it, I knew there was something wrong with me.
Then one day, I saw a commercial for anti-depressants on television. I didn't understand depression as an illness. Only as the feeling I had that constantly plagued me. I watched the commercial and thought maybe those pills could make me happy. I turned to my mom and said, "I want to be put on those."
I asked my mom constantly to have me looked at by a doctor to see if I needed to put on anti-depressants for two years. I told her over and over there was something wrong with me. I knew there had to be. Normal people weren't unhappy like I was. Not all the time, anyway.
It wasn't until I was a freshman in high school, though, that I was finally able to talk to a doctor. I remember waking up in a hospital in a city two hours away from where I lived. I didn't know what had happened. When I asked, my mom told me, "You had two Grand mal seizures in three days."
I understood immediately. My father had epilepsy and so did an aunt on my mother's side. I must have had it, too.
I wasn't diagnosed right away, though. It wasn't until two months and four seizures later that a doctor determined that my seizures were caused by stress. By then my mother was ready to listen, too, and this time she asked if I needed to be put on anti-depressants. The doctor said, "So she is a little depressed -- so what?"
Then he wrote a recommendation for a counselor who could write prescriptions if I needed them because my medical insurance wouldn't cover a psychiatrist. Two weeks later, I was taking three different types of pills every day. An epilepsy medication, an anti-depressant, and a vitamin.
By then, I had also realized that I didn't just feel like the nerdy boy with a drawer full of asthma inhalers -- I was him.

This feeling is something I'm still dealing with today. Because, I mean, who wants to be that person? Who wants to be that stereotype, taking three different pills a day?
It may sound like I'm complaining, but it isn't fun. Who wouldn't complain -- in high school, my mom bought my a pill organizer as a present just to make my life easier.
Now, I know that I was misdiagnosed in high school. I never had depression. I have bi-polar disorder and social anxiety, and epilepsy, clubfoot, scoliosis, Hay fever. The list literally feels like it goes on forever.
I'm going to start counseling for bi-polar disorder soon, and I know I'm not the only dealing with stuff like this which is why I decided to write about it.
I mean, it's not a part of every nerd's life. We don't all wake up first thing in the morning and wonder if the counselor is going to tell us we have to be put on psychosis meds, regardless of whatever horrific side-effects it might have. We don't all wonder if we're always going to feel like a dated, played-out nerdy stereotype that everyone loves to hate on. But it's part of this nerd's life, and I know I'm not the only one.
I may be a lot like that boy in the movies with a drawer full of asthma inhalers, but that isn't me. I'm still my own person.

Realization

In middle school, I began to take an interest in comic books. It only made sense, to me. I had grown up watching the cartoons based on the comics -- Batman: The Animated Series, Spider-Man, X-Men: The Animated Series, Batman Beyond, and X-Men: Evolution. In fact, by that point in time, X-Men: Evolution was at the height of it's popularity and my brother and I watched it every day after school. The problem was, I didn't know where to go to actually get comic books.
There was no comic book store in my hometown. At least, not by that point. The one that had been opened there closed down due to lack of business once people realized they could buy their kids' Pokemon cards at Walmart. The nearest Barnes & Noble was two towns away and my local library had an extremely small, condensed collection of graphic, which I avoided due to the T and T+ ratings. Yes, I really was that much of a goody two shoes.
So one day, my brother came home from school with this magazine type thing. It was called Shonen Jump and it was filled with comic-type drawings and stories. But I couldn't figure out how to read the damn thing. I asked my brother, "What's with that book you got at the book fair?"
He didn't know, either. He said he'd just bought it because it had Goku from DBZ on the front cover. At that age, I had already knew what anime was. Barely. A close friend I went to school with who, like me, was obsessed with Digimon had explained what it was and why all the cool Digimon and Pokemon toys only seemed to exist in Japan. I had never seen it in this format, though. The idea of it blew my freaking mind.
After examining the book more closely with my brother and some of his friends, I discovered that this book was actually what was known as manga -- a Japanese comic book. This one was for teenage and pre-teen boys. The reason we couldn't read it was because in Japan, they didn't read the same way we did. They read from right to left. Go figure.
Even the manga my brother had brought home was for teenage boys, I quickly asked him if I could read it -- he wasn't even old enough, anyway -- and tore through it. I skipped through the series I didn't like after a quick read of the first couple pages and read the ones I did like. The ones I had seen on Toonami like YuYu Hakusho or DBZ. I asked my mom if we could start having Shonen Jump sent to our house for my brother and I to read, and she said yes. The subscription was put in my name since I seemed to like it more, but usually whoever got home the fastest was the one to read it first. That was usually me since most of life revolved around re-reading Harry Potter and debating X-Men with my friends, who lived around the corner or next door.
After I found out about Shonen Jump, though, I realized I wanted to read different types of manga. Maybe something with more drama or romance. So I went to the library and began to search. And by that I mean, I took my copy of Shonen Jump to the library and asked the librarian, "Do you have anything like this -- it's called magma?"
If you think that's bad, I was 12 and my mom still can't pronounce it.
Anyway, the library did have some manga in the childrens' section, which my friends and I immediately requested be moved due to the T or T+ ratings that had been placed upon it. Most of it was moved, but for some reason, the librarians just did not seem to agree that Dragon Ball Z was inappropriate for small children. So Goku ripped a guy's head off -- look at the veins and the blood! Kids won't know what that is. They'll think it's awesome.
Either way, though, I had discovered shoujo manga.
The complete world of anime and manga was at my fingertips. I could read anything or watch anything. If I wanted action, I'd go for something Naruto or Yu-Gi-Oh! If I wanted something girlier, I would go for something like Cardcaptor Sakura or Sailor Moon. If I wanted something in the middle, I would go for Rurouni Kenshin, which to this day is my all-time favorite manga.
More importantly than that, I felt like I could pick up a volume of manga, read it for hours, and all of my problems would disappear. I felt like as long as I was wrapped up in my world of ninjutsu and Japanese magic, nothing could hurt me. Not the kids at school or my family or anything.
I even forgot about comic books for a while.

Today, I no longer feel the same way about manga or anime. It's not because anime and manga is bad. It's because I grew up and my standards are higher than they used to be.
I'm tired of reading about the same stereotypical characters that, somehow, seem to fit into every genre of manga because those are the stereotypes the manga-ka all conformed to. While it could be argued that even though I don't like, those stereotypes do work, I would like to argue that that may not be. The rise of anime and manga has finally ended. It's no longer as popular as it used to be. Last month, I walked into an F.Y.E.  at the mall and all the anime -- even the awesome, classic series like Death Note -- had been marked down to half-price. The anime and manga-related merchandise was gone. It had all been replaced by Marvel paraphernalia, Hunger Games backpacks, and Bat-signals. Why do you think that is?
The answer is simple: In the 1990s, there was a phenomenon known as Japanophilia that began with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Nintendo, the introduction of the pop culture classic Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, etc. and it inevitably led to an increased interest in other things from Japan -- IE anime and manga. The children of that generation, however, have grown up and I think a lot of them are facing the same struggles as I am when it comes to anime and manga.
I still read manga and watch anime. The problem is finding a series I actually like. That is a series where the Goku-esque character is not the central focus of the series or a love-triangle or harem never comes into play romantically. Don't get me wrong, there are definitely series like that out there and I've found a few of them. The problem is, even if I think the story is those series is better than all the stuff portrayed in the mainstream manga that doesn't mean it's popular. And if it's not popular, then the odds of it coming to America are less and if it's probably never coming to America, then the odds of the scanlators continuing to post it online are significantly less.
There's not much out there for readers like me, it seems and the otaku fandom, I think, is suffering.

I'm not, though.
As much as I love anime and manga, I've come to terms with the fact that I'm just not as enthusiastic about it as the rest of otaku fandom. Hell, I don't even consider myself an otaku.
I realized a long time ago that I prefer comic books to manga and I'm okay with that. I find they meet my high literary standards better than manga does, even if it means exploring parts of the Marvel multiverse I never thought to explore before. It's just part of who I am.
And that's what the point of this post is. It's about growing up as a nerd and realizing that just because you don't love something as much as you used to, you're not a bad person or a bad nerd or a bad otaku or whatever.
Like what you like. Love what you love and try to realize that just because as a nerd, you feel the need to conform to certain standards and fit into a certain fandom, you don't have to.
I'm sorry if this post comes off as corny, but I started this new section of my blog, so I could write about life as a nerd and as a nerd girl and this is part of that life.

A Tribute To The LPers -- And LPs -- That I Love

I know we all have our favorite Youtube channels and LPs and LPers. People that convince us, "Hell yes, I NEED that game!" And inspire us to voice our own opinions and critique about said game. So today I decided to share some of my favorites with you as a sort of tribute to them (see title). This post will probably be updated as I find more awesome LPers scattered across the realm of the Youtubedom. Hopefully, you guys will love them, too.

Okay, so probably my number one favorite Youtube Let's Player is Zack Scott of the ZackScottGames channel, and my favorite Let's Play that he does is the Animal Crossing: New Leaf Let's Play, featuring the town of the Astoria and much apparent hatred for koala bears that wear sunglasses. The reason this particular LP is my favorite is because I love ACNL, despite the fact that it irritates me to no end because of the fact that a lot of the maps suck (or at least the ones I've chosen have) and there simply is not enough room to place all of the Public Works Projects and because this is the first ACNL Let's Play I ever watched on Youtube.
Thanks, Zack Scott, for convincing me to go out and purchase my very first Animal Crossing video game! ^_^