Neil Rush CMT Blog- February 16, 2016- A Musician I Like

February 16, 2016

Hello, blog readers, this is Neil again. This week's assignment is to defend a musician or band I like from hypothetical haters, or just talk about a musician or band that I like and why I like them. Someone that I've recently become interested in is an internet comedy musician named Allie Goertz. Her music is usually quiet and understated acoustic rock, which actually compliments the humorous nature of her lyrics surprisingly well. The YouTube channel that all of her videos are on is called Cosbysweater (it first started a few years before October 2014, so this was just an innocent mistake). Some of the subjects of her songs have included the infamous so-bad-it's-good cult classic romantic drama that was later re-billed as a black comedy made by Tommy Wiseau called The Room, Milhouse from The Simpsons, and Dungeons and Dragons.
What really drew me to her was how she made a five-track EP of songs all about my favorite TV show, Rick and Morty. On the EP, called Sad Dance Songs, she mixes up her usual style of music to work with, in addition to acoustic and alternative rock sounds, both electronic dance music and rap. The lyrics, while usually humorous, all reflect some of the deeper dramatic and even existentialist themes that Rick and Morty has, unlike most other adult animated comedies before it. Some of the songs include "Look At Me", a song about the bizarre race of characters named Mr. Meeseeks and how they only exist to fulfill specific tasks, are immune to all forms of bodily harm and can only die once their task is completed, are driven insane by their very narrow reason for existing, and will become more dangerous and psychotic the longer they are left alive without their assigned task being completed; "Jeez Rick", a song sung from Morty's perspective about his frequent frustration with Rick taking him on all of the adventures through space and the multiverse that he does and constantly putting him in deadly situations throughout them; and my personal favorite on the album "All I Wanted", a song that could be interpreted as being about any of the five members of the Sanchez-Smith family- Rick, Morty, Jerry, Summer, or Beth- and how they feel about any other members of the family- specifically how even though they are unhappy with each other, they would most likely be more unhappy without each other, and how it's best to just live with what you do have rather than dwell on what you don't.
Goertz's musical style has been compared to comedy musician Bo Burnham, though it's rarely as dark as Burnham's music. This prompt is about defending your choice musician from haters, which is made fairly ironic by the fact that one of her songs is about haters. The song is called "An Open Letter To Myself", which is about not being elitist with your tastes, a problem she admits to having. Whether it's people liking something she doesn't like or not liking something she does, Allie has often tried to overcome her instinctive behavior of taking entertainment tastes personally. Of course, she ends the song on a deliberately and facetiously hypocritical note, saying that if someone doesn't laugh when watching Seinfeld, then "say something hurtful and never take it back". Occasionally, she does go into more serious songs, such as in her song called "To Mom", which is about how she still cares about her mother despite the fact that she bore the brunt of Allie's bad attitude as a teenager, a song I'm sure many people can relate to.
So will Allie Goertz gain more success from here? Sad Dance Songs seems to suggest yes, though only time will tell. Bo Burnham has had multiple stand-up comedy specials/concerts and briefly starred on his own MTV show called Zach Stone Is Gonna Be Famous, a mockumentary comedy-drama starring Burnham as the title character, a recent high school graduate who spends the series chasing internet fame. Despite only lasting one season, it was critically acclaimed by most news sources for deconstructing the formulas of similar shows on MTV and showing how the blind pursuit of fame is often just a cover for strong emotional insecurity. Could Allie end up doing something like this? Maybe somewhere down the line, if she got a few Netflix comedy specials first. I expect a guest appearance on Rick and Morty Season 3 as a personal thank-you from series creators Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon for paying tribute to their show with the album before anything else, however. Go look her up on YouTube to hear some of her songs, or buy them for yourself on iTunes or Google Play Music. Thank you for reading, and I'll see you next week.

Neil Rush CMT Blog- February 9, 2016- Liking Something The Media Does

February 9, 2016

Hey blog, it's Neil. This week, I'm supposed to write about something that I think the media does well. I don't think that they do much well, to be honest. This is the media we're talking about here, known for doing things that sensationalize and humiliate. And yet, if I had to find anything that they do well, I guess it giving something that deserves it a chance every once in a while. Do studio heads count as a subcategory of "the media"? They sure act like it- we always hear stories of them doing controversial things that keep people from seeing the movies that the American people want to see in favor of the international markets. This is why sequels keep getting pumped out- movie-going Americans may be sick of colorful-costumed white-man superheroes, but plenty of international markets, particularly China, still flock to them, and create both licensing deals and alternate versions of movies for these markets. Some movies, such as the 2013 R-rated college comedy "21 And Over", even have their entire premises altered for Chinese releases. While the American version is about an Asian-American college student who celebrates his 21st birthday the night before a medical school interview, the Chinese version is apparently about a young Chinese man who briefly goes to an American college, is temporarily corrupted by hedonistic Western society, and goes back to China a better person. It's amazing how editing and dubbing can make a movie appear entirely different when released in another country. This is usually done for image reasons. If a non-Asian person were seen engaging in wild partying in a Hollywood movie in China, they wouldn't care and would probably enjoy it. Because of the high regard superheroes are held in in China, the new super-anti-hero soft science fiction action black comedy Deadpool, an highly irreverent, over-the-top, and adult-oriented parody of superhero movies, has even been banned from China, despite plenty of similar violent movies already being allowed and often made in China as well. Deadpool is particularly what I wanted to talk about.

Co-created by comic writer Fabian Nicieza and comic artist Rob Liefeld, Deadpool was initially a side character in the Marvel Comics series The New Mutants and became something of a comedic partner to the antihero Cable. He was a parody of the DC Comics villain Deathstroke, with all of the same abilities and then some- near-immortal regenerative abilities, skill with guns and swords, processing information at thirty times the rate of the average human (once believed to be able to use up to thirty percent of their brains at a time before the ten percent brain myth was disproved), and various others. Their personalities are greatly different, however. While Deathstroke is usually cruel, cold, and calculating rarely involved in humor, Deadpool is almost always talking, completely filterless, and acts like a mixture of a hyperactive child and cartoon character given too much weaponry. His origin takes a potentially tragic story and turns it on its head by allowing it to happen to someone with his personality. As a pun on the real name of Deathstroke, Slade Wilson, Deadpool's real name is Wade Wilson. He was a man diagnosed with terminal cancer who volunteered for the Weapon X program in order to be cured of it, but the things they injected him with there, rather than cure it, simply froze it, giving him immortality allowing him to regenerate limbs from essentially any injury, but also giving him always-wrinkly skin. Being experimented on also drove him insane, giving him the ability to break the fourth wall and be aware of his status as a fictional comic book character, talk to the reader, and reference past issues in a way that no other characters can understand. Other mental issues he has had have included having him constantly talk with two other yellow and white thought boxes meant to represent the rest of his brain, though I don't think that these are meant to be his conscience and anti-conscience, because they both, at different times, try to convince Deadpool to do or not do the bad and/or dumb things he really wants to do. Deadpool thinks he's a superhero and often tries to be friends with other superheroes but is prevented by his own psychotic nature from being a true superhero admired by the in-universe public or respected by his idols.

A botched attempt at getting him into a movie happened in 2009. Ryan Reynolds played him as a supporting character in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, but he didn't have Deadpool's iconic costume and, at the movie's climax, appeared as a bald man with his mouth sewn shut (as a response to an earlier line said by the founder of Weapon X, William Stryker, "If you didn't have that mouth of yours, Wilson, you'd be the perfect soldier."), with the powers of other mutants, such as laser vision, teleportation, and swords coming out of his hands like Wolverine's claws, "pooled" into him. While the real Deadpool does have a remote for teleportation in the comics, it's not an actual power of his, and the rest of the powers are just ridiculous. No one thought that Deadpool could manage his own solo film, especially if it were as an R-rated, hyper-violent, and highly crass superhero movie. Sometimes, however, the studio takes a risk and pulls through. After noticing his popularity in video games such as the 2010 installment of Marvel vs. Capcom and the 2013 Deadpool video game, along with his appearances on various internet memes, people could tell that it was time for Deadpool to have his movie. Ryan Reynolds wanted to play the character again, but actually do him justice, and seems to have delivered. I guess that the media deserves props for taking a chance on Deadpool, and I think that their risk will pay off. Thank you for reading, and see you next week.

Neil Rush CMT Blog- February 2, 2016- Something To Upset Me

February 2, 2016

Hello, blog, it's Neil. I was assigned to write about something that angers me this week. The thing that angers me the most, I guess, is something that many others would probably be angry with me for being angry about- and many other others would probably be proud of me for being angry with in a way that would make me a different kind of angry. It is something that is most commonly known as "political correctness". The overuse of this phrase by various parties has caused it to lose its meaning, as is what happens when buzzwords are used widely enough or in a potentially contentious context, so I wish there was another term I could use that still depicted it as more bad than good, unlike all of the other terms for it, but I suppose I'm stuck using a hollow term.
Look, I do believe that all people deserve equal human rights and opportunity in every facet of life that it is beneficial. What I don't believe in is using it as another form of oppression, which is basically what is happening, or if it isn't, it's on its way to. The way many people, particularly on internet magazines on news, politics, and culture; on blog websites such as Tumblr, and in college safe space culture, treat these issues oftentimes betrays the overall intended purpose of social justice activism. They have a tendency to talk about issues in such a way that they express the belief that those without power are fundamentally, morally, and logically better than those with it. This is one of the most counter-productive ways of going about the issues, and seems to express the belief that they would be happy if the tables were turned and straight white men became the oppressed ones. The issue at the heart of it all isn't that people of color are oppressed, or that women are oppressed, or that LGBTETC (the etc. meant ecetera, because of all of the possible sexual and gender identities that are being acknowledged nowadays) people are being oppressed, but rather that people overall are being oppressed. I feel that political correctness only creates more cultural barriers rather than tearing them down, as it wants people to take an alleged moral standard in seeing differences in people and use those to treat them not like people, but like expensive glass sculptures- fragile in constant need of praise and admiration, and held up on a pedestal for the world to see that it exists and that you need to find it just as good as those who put it there. That last aspect, of course, is referencing politically correct casting.
While I do believe that nothing as arbitrary as race, gender, sexuality, gender identity, body ability, political belief, or religious belief should affect casting or hiring for writing or directing in a media work, I do not believe in affirmative action or anything that says that there "needs" to be a certain amount of people of color or women employed on a work in order to be seen as a properly progressive creative workspace. This turns those people into statistics to be met rather than creative voices to be valued. Take what happened with some of the people on my favorite TV show and the TV show I have lofty, if not questionable, goals to work on if it is still airing in the 2020s, Adult Swim's Rick and Morty. At some of the conventions that the series co-creators, showrunners, occasional writers and directors (the creators of TV shows rarely become writers), and stars of the show, Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon, have gone to, the two of them tried to field questions about the fact that, at least for the first two seasons, all of the show's writers were men. This might not be as big of an issue if it weren't for the fact that, being a generally politically incorrect animated series on Adult Swim, it has a handful of scenes that could be seen as sexist, particularly plenty of comments made by Rick (which I find justified in that he's openly cruel to everyone more often than not) and the manner in which Morty fantasizes about his crush, a girl at his high school named Jessica (which I also find justified in that Morty is a fourteen-year-old boy, and nearly every heterosexual fourteen-year-old boy is going to have at least one inappropriate thought about a girl). Also, despite its target demographic of men ages 18-34, it has gained sizable attention from other audiences, particularly teenagers due to its teenaged-life-centric plots involving Morty and his older sister Summer and its slightly-more-mainstream-friendly nature than most of Adult Swim's other programming; women ages 15-45 due to its strong characterization of Beth, Morty's mom and Rick's daughter, and Summer, and the rise of geek girls in general (underground comedy musician Allie Goertz recorded a five-track digital-distribution-exclusive concept album called Sad Dance Songs, an EP with songs all relating to Rick and Morty); and older people due to its darkly realistic portrayal of getting older and more melancholic mood than any other comedy on Adult Swim (its fan slogan is the line from the show "Nobody exists on purpose, nobody belongs anywhere, everybody's going to die. Come watch TV?"). All of those unexpected audiences would make it seem like it might be a good idea to have more women on the writing team, right? Except it's not that simple. Roiland and Harmon have hired a few females to the writing staff for Season 3, which is expected to air in spring 2017 due to the very long production process of the show, but when this was first announced, Roiland stressed that all of the women that were hired were hired on merit because they had wrote good scripts and were not just hired as tokens, and Harmon, who was slightly less cynical about the whole ordeal, but not much, stressed that he wants the ratio of men and women writing to be 50:50 and not any more in favor of the women, as much as some more radical feminists might like. In an ideal world, they wouldn't even have to say this. No one would care, positively or negatively, about girls writing a TV show. And even with its unexpected demographics, Roiland and Harmon know that Rick and Morty is still a boys' show at heart. This leads into a greater social issue.
I honestly believe that, contrary to what the media presents, progressives have won America since 2012. There will always be bigotry, but aside from a few voices, people have generally accepted that racism, sexism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, and ableism are bad things. While most of the productions showing minorities and once-marginalized groups doing things once done by only straights, whites, and males will not be released for another few years, the fact that there is strong market demand for these things I find to be proof enough that this is a truly idealistic and progressive age and that things are always getting better... as long as you know how to suck up to the left. Discrimination is in human nature, and even without thinking, people try to provide more for those that match their biases than those who don't. Some even use political correctness as a backhanded way to mention someone's flaws to their face. I think that fifty years down the line, the patriarchal society will become a matriarchal society, and nearly every story of oppressed minorities and white saviors will be retold somewhere along the line in real-life but with the roles switched. A man in a position of law enforcement who is of color will shoot an unarmed white teenager and the same fallout as all of the white-man-black-kid shootings will happen, and "progressive" internet journalists will disregard all of the potential gray areas involved in the incident in order to make the white teenager look like nothing but a victim of an institutionalized racist society. And then, some time later, they'll realize that they're just restarting a cycle they thought had ended years ago. And without thinking, after "justified" discrimination against straight white males ends, people will find a new arbitrary reason to discriminate against other people, say, the shape of someone's nose, and the issue of accepting people with pointy noses will become as harrowing as the issues of race, gender, and sexuality have been for years. The faces may change, but the situation stays the same- people will always think of a reason to keep those different from themselves down. This is one of the central themes of one of the things I want to make.
"Fanz", the TV series I want to make, will be set in a progressive-utopia version of my hometown of Wyomissing. In this fictionalized version of the town, people of every race, gender identity, and sexual identity are out and proud across the whole town, and they are all in strong and respectful roles. And yet, it is clearly starting to become a dystopia. Plenty of people are using their "victim" status to get away with bullying and worse, and some kids are even being driven to suicide because it is being set in their mind that, since you can't say "all lives matter" as an all-inclusive alternative to "black lives matter", they genuinely believe that "white lives don't matter." This is what happens to the childhood best friend of the protagonist, Nelly Rushberg. She is a Samoan-American Jewish fourteen-year-old trans girl who underwent intensive hormone exposure and gender reassignment surgery at age six after a neurological study that resulted in the young boy turning out to have the instincts of a girl. Due to what happened to her friend and much of what she has experienced, she takes more right-leaning views on issues most directly affecting African-Americans, Jews, and transgendered people, and more left-leaning views on everything else. She is largely disgusted by politically correct culture, even when it wants to help her, and doesn't want to be defined by anything other than her love of anime and anime-influenced animation and how she treats other people. Her love interest for the first half of the series, a girl named Tahvah Bakaar, a bisexual Lebanese-American girl, likewise takes more right-leaning views on issues affecting bisexuals, females, and Muslim-Americans, and herself is even an atheist, though she doesn't outright detest religion, she just doesn't want political correctness to give cover for either Islamic terrorism nor the less-than-admirable aspects of Islamic and Middle Eastern culture. All of the six main youth characters, for a bit of ironic satire, take right-leaning views on the issues that most directly affect them and left-leaning views on those that don't. Nelly's best friend, Giles Bolton, is a half-Caucasian, half-Japanese trans boy; Carrie Christela, Giles' love interest, is a half-Puerto Rican, half-New Jersey Italian pansexual girl raised by a member of the San Francisco Bear Brotherhood; Jin Waz, Nelly's friend and surrogate older brother, is a Korean-American inter-sexual young man with first stage palsy; and Alex Pekin, Nelly's younger cousin, is a Samoan-American gender-fluid female that seems to identify heavily with Middle Eastern culture. And yet, this is all supposed to be unimportant compared to their respective fandoms of anime, auto racing, trading card games, iPhone gaming, Broadway musicals, and documentary filmmaking. Their direct mentors, who are the main administrative staff of the school and all based on myself and some of my childhood friends, try to teach them to follow their own path and not just support what liberal media outlet supports simply because they tout their moral superiority. They take their jobs the least seriously of any staff members at the school district, and will even criticize the politically correct and pseudo-idealist beliefs of many of their students other than the main six to their faces if it is clear that they're ignorant about various societal factors and are clearly making it more about themselves than the core issues at hand. With any luck, if my show manages to get out in the manner I want it to, it will make people think that whatever point of view people may take about both fandom and social justice issues, they're wrong.
Thank you for reading this, and I hope you might think about how this applies to your life in America and the world today.

Neil Rush CMT Blog- January 26, 2016- Technology Over Anonymity

January 26, 2016

Hello blog readers, it's Neil. With the Gravity Falls series finale still a few weeks away and none of the other things I like really strongly relevant in the media, I've decided to find an article on the internet that could potentially be related to Communications Media Technology and write about it instead. I found an article talking about the well-worn belief that internet anonymity is why people are more inclined to say unkind things, engage in dangerous anti-social behavior, and express a desire to break the law on the internet than in person. An article I recently read on eurekalert.org written by the University of Kent entitled "Social media technology rather than anonymity is the problem" says... well, exactly that.
The article states that a new book written by Dr. Vincent Miller entitled The Crisis of Presence in Contemporary Culture: Ethics, Privacy, and Speech in Mediated Social Life intends to argue this point. Dr. Miller uses this book to examine the desire for freedom of speech on the internet versus the desire for civil discourse. He claims that rather than internet anonymity allowing for the worst elements of human nature to come out on internet social media websites and message boards, it is the structure of these very websites that allows for it. Miller stresses that if these issues are to be stopped, then "social media architecture should be organized the same way as physical architecture". The book questions the authenticity of the moral panics that have derived from internet use and abuse and whether or not ethics, privacy, and free speech can truly coexist in the modern world. Miller also recommends trying to add more humanity to social media software, however that can be done, and possibly making internet identity less anonymous, despite that not exactly being the issue.
This article, despite being pretty short, was still a very interesting read. I don't think it's entirely correct, because some message boards already do try to add more humanity to their commenters (and it almost never works as intended), but at least it's well-intentioned. Maybe one day there can be a balance between order and chaos. However, we should also take into account that they may not be as much of opposites as once believed. Thank you for reading, and I'll see you again next week.

Neil Rush CMT Blog- January 19, 2016- Steven Universe Analysis and Review

January 19, 2016

Hello again, blogosphere, this is Neil Rush. There are many different shows I have liked and have gotten into, but with no new Gravity Falls episodes until the series finale in February, I've decided to talk about one of those other shows, a show that has many shared fans with Gravity Falls- a show on Cartoon Network called Steven Universe.

Created by Rebecca Sugar, a woman known for her work on Cartoon Network's Adventure Time shortly before going off to make her own show in a similar style and make Steven Universe the first Cartoon Network Original Animated Series to be created by a woman (but not the first animated series ever to be created, developed, or creatively controlled by one, as many fine cartoons on Cartoon Network and other channels in the past have had women in all of the important creative positions), Steven Universe has a pretty layered story. It follows its title character Steven Quartz Universe (voiced by Zach Callison), a happy, friendly, and somewhat effeminate thirteen-year-old boy loosely based on Steven Sugar, Rebecca Sugar's younger brother, living in the fictional town of Beach City, Maryland with his single dad Greg Universe (voiced by comedian Tom Scharpling), who is a former traveling rock star, and three millennia-old aliens named the Crystal Gems- Garnet (voiced by R&B artist Estelle), Amethyst (voiced by Michaela Dietz), and Pearl (voiced by Deedee Magno Hall). The three of them are old friends of Rose-Quartz (voiced by Susan Egan, known for voicing Megara in Disney's Hercules from 1997), a Gem that was a general of the Homeworld Gems' armies until she and the other three defected due to disagreeing with the rest of the species' desire to reap the Earth of its resources. She later met Greg, and while she initially saw humans as more of a novelty than as her equals, she later grew to fall in love with Greg, and later sacrificed her form into that of a half-human, half-Gem child, that child being Steven. Steven and the Gems use their Gem powers to fight evil around the universe, and while Steven is still developing his powers, he usually knows how to use them effectively.

The other Crystal Gems manage to have their own distinct personalities, all meant to serve as motherly figures to Steven. Garnet is calm and collected, but also noble and courageous, blending traits from the two other Gems she is made from, Ruby (voiced by Charlene Yi) and Sapphire (voiced by Erica Luttrell). Gems have the ability to fuse with one another as long as they trust each other to form larger Gems featuring characteristics of both and/or all of the Gems that fused to make them yet still identifying as their own Gem. Ruby and Sapphire are two Gems that are madly in love with one another and spend most of their time fused as Garnet as a result. Amethyst is more of a big sister figure than a motherly figure to Steven because despite being a few thousand years old like Garnet and Pearl, she is the youngest of the Gems, and was born in a cave network on Earth referred to as the Kindergarten rather than on the Gem Homeworld. This also explains her more naturally crass personality than Garnet and Pearl, though she also feels insecure about herself at times due to her "messier" upbringing than the other Gems. Pearl is probably the most confusing of the main characters. She is the most motherly of the three Gems, often reprimanding Steven when he acts careless while also trying to show up to almost everything he does around town, protect him from anything she can, and convey that she loves him as a mother does, yet also has a tendency to describe humans as lesser to Gems in nearly every way and act extremely awkward at times and highly self-centered at other times. Much of this is because of how, while this will never be stated outright in the show yet the creators have said as much on social media, Pearl was in love with Rose, but to a somewhat possessive level, and believed that she was inferior to Rose in every way and could only be something useful when Rose was by her side. This may extend from the fact that other members of the Pearl Gem sub-race were designed to be servants to other Gems, and while Rose never treated Pearl like one, it was in Pearl's instincts to act as a servant, even if that meant being an emotional slave. She resented Greg for the longest time for his relationship with Rose, and to an extent resents Steven for being the very reason Rose is no longer alive. Because Rose is gone, Pearl doesn't understand her purpose, which is the crux of her character development arc- outgrowing her crush on Rose and becoming her own Gem-person.

The show has received significant praise for its animation style, largely inspired by anime and 80s/90s video games; its music, with many episodes featuring musical numbers that expand on certain characters' emotions, with the most iconic example being the song sung by Garnet in the episode "Jail Break", the song being called "Stronger Than You" which is what she sings while fighting the Homeworld Gem Jasper as the other Crystal Gems take control of a Homeworld Gem Prison Spaceship; its mature characterization; and its willingness to play with gender roles. Its protagonist is a boy with many traits more commonly associated with female characters, such as strongly showing his emotions and having more defensive abilities than offensive ones, yet is still meant to be a clear boy. Connie Maheswaren (voiced by Grace Rolek), Steven's best human friend and almost-love-interest (despite enjoying snuggling and dancing with one another, the terms they use when talking with each other seem to keep them in the friend-zone), despite being a girl, has a few more masculine traits than Steven, such as being skilled with sword-fighting thanks to Pearl, and is the bigger bookworm than Steven, yet also has her fair share of feminine traits, such as usually wearing dresses. The Gem species is meant to be genderless yet predominantly consist of beings with female characteristics and use female pronouns. Ruby and Sapphire, for example, are a unique way of zigzagging with a chaste depiction of an LGBT relationship in a work meant for a shared audience of kids and adults. Despite both using female pronouns and being voiced by women, the fact that the two of them are technically genderless brings it simply to the realm of "two beings in love", with gender not being a part of it, and Ruby's androgynous appearance also adds another layer to the storytelling. Sometimes, the writing isn't as strong as I would like it to be, often falling into traps of being too hammy and/or sentimental. The general concept and themes discussed keep me from disliking the show, however. Greg and Ruby are probably my two favorite characters, and some of Steven and Connie's interactions fall into guilty pleasure territory. I'm even inspired to write my own fan fiction series called Steven Multiverse, in which Steven, Greg, Connie, and the Gems team up with both versions of them from a gender-bender universe of their own universe (a gender-bender universe, or Rule 63 universe, is a universe in which all characters from one work of fiction are reimagined as the opposite gender of what they are in their main in-canon universe) and versions of them from a partial gender-bender universe, in which some but not all characters have their gender swapped from what it is in the canon universe (basically something resembling what I would do if I had thought of something like Steven Universe) and try to stop a threat to different versions of the Universe family across the multiverse.

The most recent developments in the story occurred in a week of new episodes at the beginning of January, with episodes such as one in which Garnet tells Steven the story of how Ruby and Sapphire met and, by proxy, how she came into being; one in which Steven turns fourteen years old; and a few showing how Peridot (voiced by Shelby Rabara), a former enemy of the Crystal Gems, became a member of them after growing to trust them while in what was supposed to be a temporary alliance. These developments have made the show more interesting than ever before, and I hope that the show finds a positive new direction from here on out. Thank you for reading, and I'll see you next week.  

Neil Rush CMT Blog- January 5, 2016- Settling On An Interest

January 5, 2016

Happy new year, blog readers, this is Neil Rush. I finally managed to sort out that "interest identity crisis" I mentioned in the last post. After adding something I forgot to include in the original list made last summer and another thing to even the list out, I looked through all of the wikis for things on that old list to see which ones people had responded to me on, which ones needed an update, and which ones were on the new version of the pattern I made after adding two more to the old list. After cycling through the new list with my pattern, I managed to choose Lego, the company of building toys I had fondly grown up on. I may try to buy old Lego sets in order to try my hand at stop-motion filmmaking. I think I'll have my films primarily center around the Lego theme from 2007-2008 known as Mars Mission. This was a theme involving astronauts going to Mars to mine for crystals while fighting aliens for the ability to have them. Contrary to what you may expect, the aliens are not Martians, but rather coming from another planet. This may be because the theme is implied to be a sequel theme to a Lego theme from 2001 known as Life On Mars, in which the Martians were not antagonists. My stop-motion film would try to make the story deeper than how it was presented when the sets were in production, yet also make fun of some of the things Lego does when they make themes for kids. I will also try to cross it over with other themes like what was done in the Lego video game Lego Battles. That would also try to mix in other Lego Space themes, such as Space Police, Exo-Force (which isn't exactly a space theme, but the evil robots from it are included on Mars in Lego Battles), Blacktron: Future Generation, Exploriens, and Ice Planet 2002. The films may also joke about why humans are almost always the heroes and aliens are almost always the villains in Lego's Space themes. For humorous purposes, I may also try to have some of my films cross over with Lego Castle and Lego Pirates by having the astronauts and aliens manage to travel through time.
Another big Lego thing I am interested in is the video game Lego Dimensions. It is Lego and Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment's attempt at a toys-to-life video game in the same style as Skylanders, Disney Infinity, and Nintendo's Amiibos, but is most likely better than all three due to the involvement of Lego and some of the themes seen in the game. It manages to cross over DC Comics, The Lord of the Rings, The Lego Movie (the movie that uses Legos and a character going through the hero's journey as a metaphor for father-son issues), The Wizard of Oz, The Simpsons, Lego Ninjago (Lego's theme centered around ninjas that can turn into miniature elemental tornadoes, yes, it's as ridiculous as it sounds), Doctor Who (the iconic British mostly-family-oriented science fiction adventure comedy-drama TV-series-based franchise about a two-hearted millenium-old alien taking on the form of a well-dressed British man and traveling through time and space with different young women as companions in a time machine that looks like a blue British police box that uses space technology and the fact that it's technically alive as well to be bigger on the inside than it is on the outside and saving people from various creepy villains), Back to the Future, Portal (a darkly humorous first-person puzzle game set in an empty laboratory and guided by a psychotic artificial intelligence unit named GLaDOS), Ghostbusters, classic arcade games created by Midway Games (because Time Warner bought them out in 2009), Scooby-Doo, Lego Legends of Chima (a Lego franchise involving warring tribes of anthropomorphic animals), and Jurassic Park. More franchises are expected to join in the future. I don't have the game yet because of my decision to wait to get anymore PlayStation 3 games or replace the system with a PlayStation 4 until I know more about the release of the next South Park video game on the PlayStation 4. Until then, I hope to try and cross over some of the themes from the game that already have existing sets and aren't just in the game with the other older themes I wanted to make Lego stop-motion films with.
While these are not my primary interests, I also still have a desire to make original stories based on Rick and Morty, Steven Universe, South Park, Gravity Falls, American Dad, BoJack Horseman, Avatar: The Last Airbender/The Legend of Korra, Atlantis: The Lost Empire, Toy Story, How to Train Your Dragon, Okami, and Super Mario Bros. I also want to make my original stories, such as an attempt at a genre crossover between outer-space science fiction and supernatural horror, a musical horror-comedy, various forms of socio-political satire, and of course, Fanz. I actually hope to become a writer and storyboarder on Rick and Morty for a few years before making some of my original projects, so I may try to write Rick and Morty stories that go above mere fan fiction and are actually supposed to be a part of the show. With any luck, I'll be given the time and opportunities necessary to make all of the things that I want to make to the best of my ability. Thank you for reading, and I'll see you next week.

Neil Rush CMT Blog- December 15, 2015- My Interest Identity Crisis

December 15, 2015

Hello, blog readers, it's Neil. Since the end of my senior year of high school/beginning of the summer of 2015, I have been going to a variety of wikis on Wikia, a hub for making wikis on literally any subject and posting blog posts on those wikis about my opinions on those topics. Obviously, it's not every wiki in existence, just the ones for things I like- in particular, the ones for my favorite shows on Disney XD, Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network, Adult Swim, Comedy Central, Fox, FX, and Netflix; my favorite comic book companies, characters, and comic book-based media; my favorite books from my youth; my favorite Lego themes; my favorite YouTube channels, personalities, and Let's Players; my favorite film franchises and animation studios; and my favorite video game franchises. I wish it were a lot more simple than it is.
For starters, I never expected it to take as long as it is taking. I intended to be finished by the end of the summer, but by the end of July, I realized that the pattern I made to decide what I would focus on doing that day, with different ways of doing this being some of the options, wasn't enough to get all of the blogs done by the end of the summer. I tried doing them whenever I wasn't doing something else or had another obligation, which my parents don't entirely understand. Because they are not me, they cannot understand how important it is to me that I put as much else on hold as I can to finish these wiki-blogs. As of this writing, I have thirteen left, and a few more than that to simply post minor information about myself on in case I don't have a strong enough opinion about whatever the wiki's topic is to write my heart out about it. Over the past few months, I've done a little over a hundred posts, one on each wiki that has a community blog. Not all of them have one, which makes things both easier and harder in different ways. Due to some people thinking that Wikia is only in it for the money and doesn't care about the fans, they made an offshoot called the Nintendo Independent Wiki Alliance, which is made for mostly Nintendo wikis and has a handful of non-Nintendo wikis partnered with them as well, such as a Digimon wiki, a Halo wiki, and even a Simpsons wiki. While disagreeing with the idea that Wikia wants to NEGATIVELY exploit fandom for profit (though I do think that some of their ideas, like trying to get every fandom with a wiki on it to make their own meals themed to whatever the meal's creator is a fan of, border on the saccharine in terms of internet fangirl gushing, though probably not as bad as fangirls on Tumblr), I still intend to use Nintendo Independent Wiki Alliance in conjunction with Wikia because of how their wikis on Nintendo games are more fleshed out than Wikia's wikis on Nintendo games. There are many wikis I'm considering more strongly than others for a variety of reasons.
Some I'm considering because they're underdeveloped and are in need of much more information on their given subjects. An underdeveloped wiki would be easier to climb up the social ladder on than a more developed one and be easier to gain an administrator title on. One wiki that falls into this category is the Adult Swim wiki, the wiki for the programming brand occupying Cartoon Network during nighttime hours known for its off-color and experimental adult-oriented animated programming, which is severely lacking for information on its newer shows, such as Rick and Morty, its most popular show these days and considered by many to be the best show ever produced for the network. Another is the wiki for BoJack Horseman, the iconic Netflix animated dark comedy about the sad life of an anthropomorphic horse that used to be famous and his attempts and failures at getting back into the limelight and feeling cared for by others again. The next one is for Clone High, a short-lived animated series from the early 2000s that was created by two content creators I like, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, that has gained a cult following since its premature cancellation, about a high school in an underground government base full of teenage clones of historical figures, such as Abraham Lincoln, Gandhi, and JFK, all of which are either nothing like the people they're clones of or exemplify nothing but their worst qualities. The one after that is the Cow And Chicken Wiki, a wiki for a Cartoon Network show from the 90s about, well, a cartoon cow and chicken. There are also ones for Dark Horse Comics, the third largest comic book publisher in America, and one for film adaptations of its original works. Then there's the one for Disney XD, the more animation-friendly-nowadays spinoff of Disney Channel, which is severely lacking for information on shows like Gravity Falls, Star Vs. The Forces Of Evil, Penn Zero: Part-Time Hero, Randy Cunningham: 9th Grade Ninja, and Wander Over Yonder, five of the best family-oriented animated programs currently on TV (in the case of Gravity Falls and Star Vs. The Forces Of Evil, I use the term "family" loosely). Then comes the Fox Animation Wiki, a wiki about the Fox network's Sunday night lineup, which isn't very active anymore due to Animation Domination somewhat falling apart in the past few years, with The Cleveland Show being cancelled, American Dad moving to TBS, and live-action shows thrown into the mix. In spite of the wiki's general irrelevance, I think that information on all of the animated sitcoms ever produced by 20th Century Fox is still worth sharing on that wiki. I may also consider circulating the wiki for Johnny Bravo, the classic Cartoon Network show about a woman-crazy blonde Elvis. Then there is the wiki for Universal Parks And Resorts and their chain of parks, which I would want to share information on. Then there's one for The Mighty B, a late-2000s Nick cartoon co-created by Amy Poehler, who I've gained more faith in after hearing her voice Joy in Disney/Pixar's Inside Out. I didn't like the show for a little while, but I decided to give it another chance recently thanks to her involvement. Another is the wiki for Nickelodeon, the kids' network and brand with which I have a varied but mostly positive history with the programming of. Many of the wikis for its shows on its "Category:Shows with wikis" page have gone mysteriously missing, and I hope to fix this.
Then there are the wikis that people have actually responded to me on. These would be prime candidates for spending time on because I know that these wikis have active users willing to give me feedback. I deliberately make it hard to respond because of how I disable comments on most of my posts out of fear of generating controversy and being flamed. It's good to know that there are at least a few people willing to help me out on the wikis. People on the Ben 10 wikis have responded positively to things I have had to say, and liked my idea for original stories based on the show centered around one alien from each of the ten original alien species from the first incarnation of the franchise fighting various villains outside of the town of Bellwood, the primary setting of the three sequel series. People on the BoJack Horseman Wiki have responded to my blog post there, saying that they are working on my primary complaint, that the wiki is underdeveloped, and trying to make the wiki more complete. I also received a response on my blog post on The Boondocks Wiki, the wiki for the very-off-color comedy show on Adult Swim based on the comic strip of the same name that was one of the hardest inside looks at African-American culture ever created, centered around ten-year-old nationalist Huey Freeman, his impressionable eight-year-old younger brother Riley Freeman, and their legal guardian grandfather, or "granddad" and former civil rights activist (sort of) Robert Freeman. It advised that I try to shorten the blog post, which I would if I were to choose that as my main wiki. It was fairly long  because of how it was a large ramble about how the racial themes of the show and how they affect me both positively and negatively, as someone who benefits from white privilege immensely living in a culture that makes it more of a negative stigma every day. I also received a response on the Dragon Ball Wiki, the wiki for the iconic anime series about Goku and the Z-Fighters, also recommending spacing paragraphs, which I think may have been done for me, given that when something is posted to the community blog on one of these wikis, it becomes anyone's to edit. I also received one on the fanon (meaning for fan-made spinoff stories) wiki for DreamWorks Animation, the popular Hollywood animation studio that made Shrek, Madagascar, Kung Fu Panda, How To Train Your Dragon, and many other animated film franchises, though I don't remember what it was about in particular. Then there was the one for The Lego Movie, which called into question my claim that the movie was not all in the kids' imagination, but it was still good to hear. A variety of people responded to my post on The Mighty B wiki, implying that it may not be as desolate as once believed. People also responded to my blog post on the 6teen wiki, a Canadian animated teen sitcom about teens at a mall, something of a deconstructive parody of the teen dramedy genre. The people on the wiki were happy to see another fan, and they should be. I also received a response to my post on the Sonic The Hedgehog Wiki, liking the story of my history with the Sonic video game franchise but expressing confusion at the reference to one of the many Sonic theme songs at the beginning of the post, thinking it was supposed to mean more than just a joke. There were also a few on the South Park Fanon Wiki, praising my idea for a dramedy reimagining of the life of the New Kid from the show's Stick Of Truth video game, even though it had been done before in many other fan fiction formats, but the difference with this one is its more deconstructive take. There was also a response I received on the Image Comics Wiki, the wiki for the fourth largest comic publisher in America, responding to my lament that not many works of their's were being adapted into other media outside of The Walking Dead, and saying that more adaptations can and should be expected in the near-future. Then there was one on the SpongeBob wiki, which didn't say much, though it seemed to express mild awkwardness at how I felt about the current direction of the cartoon. There was also one on the fanon wiki for Cartoon Network's Steven Universe, their most popular and critically-acclaimed show as of right now, centered around an optimistic and fairly effeminate twelve-year-old boy, his single dad, and the three alien women that live with them, who use pseudo-magical powers to fight various evils. It seemed to praise my ideas of a prequel centered around Ruby and Sapphire, the two Gems that make up the character Garnet (the Gem characters can fuse into larger, more powerful Gem characters, and Garnet is a character that spends more time as a fusion than as two separate Gems), one about a teenage Steven traveling through space with the Gems, and one about them chasing Uncle Grandpa, a character from another Cartoon Network show, through the multiverse and trying to stop his plans to ruin the lives of other Cartoon Network characters as a response to the slightly-controversial crossover between the two shows, given the VASTLY different audiences and story purposes between the two shows. They did think that I shouldn't try too hard to build the wiki's content up, seeing as how a smaller wiki is easier to manage, and the very large and busy canon wiki for Steven Universe can get hectic at times. My point exactly for trying to find an underdeveloped wiki to work on. There was also a message I received on the Toonami wiki, the block that used to be on Cartoon Network for airing shows for a teenage audience (never stopped me from watching it well before I could handle most of its shows) until its end in 2008 and revival in 2012 on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim block on Saturday nights, where it now airs uncut anime and revivals of action-oriented Cartoon Network shows from the past that have gained pretty decent adult cult followings, such as Samurai Jack. Someone said something about the reason why I disabled comments was because I was new, but it was really because I went on a rant about old Cartoon Network vs. new Cartoon Network and didn't want to get flamed... because I was new. I also wrote one on the TV Hub, the section of Wikia that its most popular TV show-themed wikis are showcased on, and people found humor in my comical post on comparing different kinds of television programming to different food groups. Then there was one on the wiki for We Bare Bears, my favorite Cartoon Network show currently airing. It's a lighthearted and generally feel-good show about three cartoon bears- a grizzly bear, a panda bear, and a polar bear- living in San Francisco and trying to make human friends. It was the only wiki that I noticed that had a direct link to the section of its forum for new users to introduce themselves, and while it didn't happen right away, I was welcomed on that wiki in a very open fashion. The last one is a wiki that is not on Wikia, but I included anyway- the big one, Wikipedia. I liked the way they welcome new users, which is why I included it on the list of wikis I consider using regularly more than all of the rest.
Then there are the wikis I included because of the decision-making pattern I use for decisions like this that only makes sense to me. The first one that was selected as a result of that formula is Kim Possible, the mid-2000s Disney cartoon about a secret agent teenage girl, her clumsy best-friend-that-eventually-becomes-her-boyfriend, and his pet naked mole rat. Then the pattern chose Adventure Time, Cartoon Network's modern classic about a preteen boy and his elastic talking dog living in a trippy, post-apocalyptic fantasy land. The next fandom of mine that the pattern chose was Kirby, Nintendo's video game series about a pink puffball creature with a vacuum-mouth that uses the abilities of anything and anyone he eats to save his home of Dream Land from the corrupt rule of King Dedede, an obese penguin king with similar abilities to Kirby and a part-wood-part-metal drill hammer. Then there was the wiki for American Dragon: Jake Long, a mid-2000s Disney cartoon about a New York City teen with the ability to turn into a dragon. Then there was the wiki for the Lego brand, which I have a strong history with. After that came the wiki for Animorphs, the book series about five teenagers given the ability to turn into any animal they touch by a dying alien war prince to fight a secret invasion by parasitic alien slugs wanting to take over the brains of all sentient creatures in the known universe. Many gray areas are created by the fact that the alien slugs need to live in a host body to survive, and questions about the ethics of war and the definitions of "good guy" and "bad guy" are deliberately distorted. I also included the Lifestyle Hub on that pattern-made list, the hub wiki gathering all of the wikis without a book series, comic series, movie series, TV series, video game series, or music artist at their center. Then I included the one for Archer, FX's animated action-black-comedy about a narcissistic and airheaded James Bond-style "secret" agent and those he works with. Then there's the one for Making Fiends, a cartoon series about a gleefully-ignorant blue girl under the belief that a misanthropic green girl that makes monsters called "fiends" that she uses to keep the people of the town the show is set in under a constant feeling of terror is her best friend, completely unaware of how much the green girl detests her and often narrowly avoiding serious bodily harm from the fiends. I then managed to select the wiki for Attack On Titan, the popular anime about the military force in a post-apocalyptic society protecting the remnants of humanity from a race of giants called Titans. The pattern then selected the wiki for Marvel Movies, which collects information on all films based on Marvel Comics, and now collects information on TV series based on them due to their rise in popularity and relation to Marvel's movies. Then came the wiki for Batman: The Brave And The Bold, a Silver Age Of Comics-inspired late 2000s-early 2010s show about Batman teaming up with various other DC Comics superheroes. The wikis for The Mighty B and Ben 10 were included in this pattern. Then the wiki for Mortal Kombat, the iconic fighting video game series, was included in the pattern. The last wiki was the Blue Sky Studios Wiki, the wiki for the animation studio that made Ice Age, Rio, and the recent Peanuts movie.
I am also planning on including wikis for things that have shared fandoms with Kim Possible in the final list that will decide what wiki(s) I'm going to focus on the most and what thing I'll center my pop culture life around for the foreseeable future. Thanks to Disney Channel's Lilo And Stitch: The Series, the TV series spinoff of the Disney movie about a Hawaiian eight-year-old girl and her pet alien, having crossovers with multiple other Disney animated TV series, namely Kim Possible, American Dragon: Jake Long, The Proud Family, and Recess, Kim Possible is indirectly connected to all of them, so that's why I decided to make them all major contenders. The creators of Kim Possible, Bob Schooley and Mark McCorkle, have worked on many of Disney's straight-to-video-and-DVD movies in the 90s, so I decided to tie that back to the main Disney wiki and include that under the umbrella as well. They worked on Buzz Lightyear Of Star Command, an animated TV series spinoff of Disney/Pixar's Toy Story movies centered around the fictional character Buzz Lightyear and his travels in space rather than Andy's action figure of him that comes to life along with all of the other toys when humans aren't around, so I'll include that show as well. A few years after Kim Possible ended, that duo went to work on Nickelodeon's TV spinoff of DreamWorks' Monsters Vs. Aliens, so the wiki for that will be included as well. The director of Kim Possible's second and third seasons, Steve Loter, is widely considered to have defined the show's tone at its best, so other things he's worked on will have their wikis laid out as options on my final list as well. Those shows include, in addition to many of the things already listed, Brandy And Mr. Whiskers, a mid-2000s Disney cartoon about a socialite dog and an ex-con rabbit that get stranded together in the Amazon rainforest; Ren And Stimpy, the Nickelodeon cartoon about the Odd Couple style relationship between a short-tempered chihuahua and a simple-minded fat cat; Duckman, a USA animated series from the 90s about a cynical businessman duck; and Kevin Smith's Clerks: The Animated Series, a very short-lived animated spinoff of Kevin Smith's 90s comedy film Clerks.
I also felt like throwing in Gravity Falls, the critically-acclaimed Disney animated series about two twin siblings discovering supernatural occurrences in a small Oregon town during the summer before they turn thirteen. It is the show I think about the most for fan fiction nowadays, most likely because of similarities between the protagonist Dipper Pines and myself I notice, the in-depth storyline leaving much open to fan interpretation, and, probably the main draw for me to write fan fiction about it, the show is set over the course of the summer of 2012, yet didn't stop airing after that summer ended. It has sporadically aired episodes since then, and the series finale is due out on Martin Luther King Day 2016, President's Day 2016, or the first day of spring 2016, with a book meant to contain all of the loose ends due out summer 2016 and a revival/sequel project expected to be released sometime in 2017. I selected one of the real-life days on which one of the episodes aired (the one that aired on August 24, 2015) and decided to make that the starting point of my series. Dipper Pines and his twin sister, best friend, and platonic love interest Mabel Pines are sixteen in my series rather than twelve/thirteen like they are in the actual show. In this series of mine, the twins have been living in Gravity Falls ever since they moved back there to spend their teen years there as their parents' thirteenth birthday present for them and as a reward for saving the world from Bill Cipher and Weirdmageddon at the end of the summer of 2012. Now that knowledge of the supernatural has spread around the world in my series, the twins, their great-uncles Stan and Ford, their man-child friend Soos Ramirez, their now-a-high-school-senior friend and Dipper's first pubescent crush but now just a close friend Wendy Corduroy, and enemies-turned-friends Robbie Valentino, Pacifica Northwest, Gideon Gleeful, and Toby Determined are all regarded as heroes due to their involvement in saving the world, and now fight supernatural evil together. The characters each go through new arcs. Dipper struggles with feeling like the only sane one among his new group of friends meant to be a boy mirror to Mabel and her friends Candy and Grenda and with his crushes on his six closest female friends outside of Mabel that all like him back as well, making it hard for Dipper to ask one out without hurting someone else's feelings, as he cares a little too much about not hurting people's feelings even when it's unavoidable- Pacifica, Candy, Lindy, who is a younger cousin of Wendy's that I made up, and Emma Sue, Nichole, and Kari, the names I gave to three girls that Dipper met on a road trip in the summer of 2012 but he had spurned due to an awkward situation on that road trip, who have now all moved to Gravity Falls and have come to an understanding with Dipper over that awkward situation and really like Dipper now. Mabel takes a hard look at whether or not she's good enough of a sister to Dipper, fears that the fact that things have always come easier for her than Dipper has resulted in Dipper having low self-worth, and wonders how she can keep him close without feeling overly dependent on him. Stan and Ford deal with getting old and deal with having the darker elements of their past come back to haunt them. Soos is now a married man and loving dad, but is forced to question his worth as a parent when his deadbeat dad comes back into his life. Wendy struggles with potentially being attracted to Dipper now that he's older and whether or not such an attraction is healthy. Robbie weighs his distaste for authority and desire to dismantle most of the government against the safety and trust of Wendy and his girlfriend Tambry, the only two people he truly cares about. Pacifica tries to be a better person than the rest of the Northwest family but is afraid she's doomed to just become, to quote the show, "another link in the world's worst chain." Gideon goes through a similar struggle, and starts a new job as a psychic debunker, the exact opposite of what he was in the actual show. Toby tries to use his fame to become cooler than he ever was before. Even Bill Cipher goes through his own dramatic arc, and struggles with both family issues and his desire to bring a new Weirdmageddon to another dimension that may be held back by his potential addiction to Dimension 46'\, the setting of Gravity Falls. And in my series, Dipper and Mabel's parents are based off of Alex Hirsch, the creator of Gravity Falls, and Rebecca Sugar, the creator of Steven Universe, which shares many fans with Gravity Falls due to similar people working on them and similar characters. Basing their parents off of real people is my way of adding deconstructive satire on what a creator will do to keep their creations from falling victim to bad fan ideas, leading to a war between fictionalized versions of people that work on Gravity Falls and the shows it shares many fans with and fans that want the right to interpret the things they like as they choose, with the Gravity Falls characters caught in the middle. This big fan fiction idea, coupled with the fact that I shared my opinions on the show ending just as I was getting into it on a fan discussion on the Gravity Falls Wiki, all contribute to why I will make Gravity Falls part of my final decision-making list.
There are still more wikis I may make a part of my list, and depending on the final amount of wikis on the list, I may add a wiki if it ends up being an odd number not ending in 5 or is the number 83, because I use the number 498 to make decisions in this area, and 83 is a factor of 498. Even numbers, numbers ending in 5, and numbers that are factors of your choice number are much easier to manage than plain old odd numbers. The wiki that I chose for such a situation is the Rick And Morty Wiki, the wiki for the critically-acclaimed Adult Swim show about a grandfather/grandson duo traveling through time, space, and the multiverse in hilariously horrifying adventures. I chose this wiki because of how it's my favorite of the few wikis on Wikia to not have a Community Blog, making me feel as if it wasn't given a fair chance for another user to respond to my presence on it. None of the wikis on Nintendo Independent Wiki Alliance have Community Blogs, but I'm OK with that because of the different website. Rick And Morty is my favorite of the blog-free Wikia wikis for things I like because of how series co-creator Dan Harmon has Asperger's Syndrome and I feel that both of the title characters are supposed to have it as well, along with the fact that it's the first Adult Swim show to provide a large amount of emotional depth alongside surreal and discomforting humor the half-network is known for. And Mr. Meeseeks. Definitely another reason to include the show on my Top Wikis List if I get an odd number that is difficult to work with.
Yes, this is beyond complicated on purpose. I do this because I don't want to leave anything up to chance or appear to be a bandwagon fan of anything. It would be much easier if I simply looked at everything, picked something, and said "I like this", but that doesn't feel entirely fulfilling to me. People like me like things that keep you thinking in patterns almost forever. Fortunately, this can't last much longer. I only have a few more wikis to post blog posts on, and a few more than that to post basic information to, followed by one final post on the main Wikia hub wiki, and then I'll make my final pattern to decide what will be my main fandom, which is the fandom I'll use the wiki for and talk with people about on TV Tropes, a casual wiki for analyzing character and story tropes within various media formats (character archetypes, common plot devices, etc.), make the favorite thing of the character most directly based off of myself in my original series that is a speculative fiction/dramedy reimagining of certain aspects of my life, and focus my post-Christmas shirt budget on, as I have held off putting anything on my Christmas list besides money this year in order to work this out easier. Thanks to the concept of "friendly fandoms" introduced to me on TV Tropes, which is a term used for fans of one thing that often get along with fans of another thing for some reason or are fans of both of those things, I'll also try to engage in the online wiki fan communities of at least some of the friendly fandoms of whatever my main fandom is. At this point, this quest has not benefited anyone but me, and "benefit" may be something of a stretch as well, given that I've limited interaction with my friends in order to get this done. But once it's all done, it will benefit others, such as the internet friends I may make through this endeavor (hoping they're not catfish, a term used for people who use fake personas on the internet or aren't even real people at all and are just computer viruses). Fandom is a cruel mistress that will make you do things you otherwise never would, but it is a unifying force that keeps me happy in a world so cold, which is my main motivation for finding the perfect one in such a complicated manner, and I'm positive that I'll be at a better place once it's all done. Thank you for reading, and see you next blog post.