I do find this movie beautiful. The animals do have a style to them that is more realistic than cartoon. The landscape and water is quite realistic not stylized to fit the style of the animals. 

The story is up for interpretation as some scenes are a bit abstract. Definitely a movie I'd recommend to animal lovers. It might be good for children but its not an action packed movie to keep a long attention span if they're easily bored or distracted if they're young.

 Andor is a spin off Star Wars series that is a prequel to the movie Rogue One. And the Rogue One movie is a prequel to the original Star Wars trilogy. This is all build up that leads into getting the Death Star plans. So since its before the original trilogy, there are no Jedis or Siths. No major characters like R2D2 that appears or even mentioned. But I do find this series very compelling and entertaining. The story really helps build the world and the empire as well as the rebels. 

 The series follows several characters and plotlines. It can be a bit confusing to keep track of them all and sometimes some story beats are fast and some are slow. Sometimes some parts of the story seems like filler. But overall the story and acting is superb! I didn't expect to enjoy it as much as I did but it is pretty well written and acted. The music also fits so well and I find the tone to be quite serious and tense. 

 There's only 2 seasons so its not a huge time commitment.  Definitely one of the best Star Wars in years!

 If you like wild animals and like the idea of caring for them in a rescue then this game is a nice way to experience that life. I found this game from searching on the app store looking for apps with foxes.  This game is free to play and pretty easy to play. You do have to unlock or pay for certain animals. There are optional ads to get more coins to pay for decorations and animals or have chores done.

Game play is pretty simple, you just drag the icons from the bottom bar to the animal or enclosure area to do chores like feeding and giving animals treatment. The rotation is a truck will drive up and honk. An icon will pop up on the left side where it will take you to the truck. A pop up will come up to show you what animal that is in need of care. You get profile of the animal with name, photo, ailment that needs treated, and bars that shows you their health. The bars are to indicate the animal's weight, health, and treatment level. The goal is to get them to go green. The weight is change by food which is the scale icon. If the animal is underweight you can drag the food icon to the bowl up to 3 times to give it more food. The scale updated right away so you can check the clipboard to see if its enough. The heart is change by water and fresh straw, and the last is obviously the treatment. Once its filled the treatment is done and you don't need to keep giving it treatment. Treatments is pretty simple too. The icons are relatively easy to understand. The sponge is for dirty animals, syringe is vaccines, the tube is for rashes, the pills is for worms, the gauze for injury, and the supplement bottle for pregnancy.  Foot steps icon will appear on the top to end the day. When the animal is healthy a person will come by and ring your doorbell asking to adopt. Adopting gives you coins! You can refuse if you want to keep the animal but there will always be someone coming by to want to adopt it. Once the animal gets adopted you have to clean the enclosure by shoveling up the straw and hosing it down.

 The days are a bit random in how many animals will come. There are obviously caps on how many animals you can care for. Some days you the truck will bring enough to almost cap your animal cap out and some days nothing happens. 

You start off with squirrels and skunks. You can care for up to 4 of each. Its not a lot to start you with so it does get rather boring with just these two. But you can use coins to unlock more animals! However it does take a bit. You will have to not buy any decorations if you want to get enough to unlock more animals. Most of the animals cost 1600 coins which is a bit hard to reach when squirrels and skunks get adopted for 20 coins. Rare ones will get you 40 coins! There are trophies that you can easily get that will reward you with coins as well. You can watch ads for coins but they only give me 10 coins which is way too little to be worth it. The cheapest animal you can unlock is the bighorn sheep which is about 580 coins. The second cheapest is black bears at 1200 coins. Most expensive are the wolves at 2000 coins. You can buy just the predators or all animals which strangely excludes mustangs. The bigger animals will fetch you 40 coins when they get adopted but they are capped at 3 each. When you unlock more animals it does get a bit easier to get the coins to unlock others. 

I do find controlling the game a bit frustrating. The icons are small and on a phone it isn't the most forgiving. So many times I try to drag the icons up only to accidentally try to close the app down on my iPhone since the icon won't let my use it unless my finger is right on top of it. The same is for everything. You must put the food in the food bowl spot and the treatment right on the animal. But this is minor. Its doesn't make me hate it but it is a slight annoyance on a small screen.

 Overall I do like this game and would recommend it for anyone who wants to virtually take care of wild animals.

 Black Mirror is a series I've been a fan of since the first season so I was excited to see that a new season came out. Some seasons has its ups and downs. I did feel each season had one or two good episodes and the rest were ok in my opinion. But this one I feel every episode is pretty good! Usually most of the episodes leave me feeling disturbed but most of the ones in this season didn't. Not to say none of it was disturbing but I felt less dread than usual.

 Some of the episodes are very human. Some interesting themes to. I was surprised the last episode is a continuation of an episode of a previous season. I think its a nice bookend to the season as it seems to circle back to the first episode. Overall I quite enjoyed this season. It didn't leave me feeling bad which is unexpected but not unwelcomed.

 So I've been hearing how good Severance was so I decided to give it a go to see. This is a Apple TV+ show but you can buy it on other platforms. At this moment there are 2 seasons with a third season planned in the future. I got hooked in the first 30 minutes. First season is great! I'm definitely glad I waited to watch it since I wouldn't be able to wait to see what happens next. The second season was a bit slower than I'd like but I was pretty satisfied with how they ended that season.

Its hard for me to describe the premise of this show but its pretty much one of those stories where there's an big corporation doing shady things with their employees. Its a scifi with the technology of a little chip that gets implanted into employees who are working on the severed floor which is below ground. They're severed because their memories are severed. They don't remember anything about themselves or much of the outside world. The floor is brightly lit with lots of plain hallways to make it a maze and no windows. When they're done their work shift of the day they don't remember anything of what they did at work. This creates two separate lives in one body. I found this show pretty thought provoking and entertaining. The writing is great, the intro music and animation is great, the acting is great, and I just really enjoyed it. The way it pokes fun at corporate speak and world was just fun to watch. Just the awkwardness between employees and their superiors was amusing to me. While I never had a office job, this kind of work environment is still happens to other industries so its something anyone who had a job can be familiar with.

I didn't expect to see Ben Stiller's name in the credits as a producer and director but I'm glad he's doing well. There's also some familiar guest actors that I was happy to see again! Overall, definitely recommend the show and say that people who said it was good is telling the truth. I look forward to season 3!

 This movie exceeded my expectations. I haven't heard of it before so I never read the book that this is based from. It looks cute from the trailers and the trailer didn't have dialogue which is a neat way to handle it. But the animals do talk. It has a great cast of known celebrities. I think the casting is well done! I didn't feel any of them were casted for their big name *cough*ChrisPratt*COUGH*

 The movie made me cry. Its such a simple but beautifully done story with barely any humans. Not having humans but a robot that becomes "human" is such a neat irony. Its not the focus but it seems like a subtle message on humans an the way we treat our environment. The premise of the this movie is a futuristic high tech task robot accidentally fell on a island. She faces the challenge of doing her job in the wildness and ends up raising a baby goose with the help of a fox who is also trying to eat it. 

 I love the art style. It has a painterly look that really works well with the cartoon style of the animals. The robot doesn't look out of place either in this style. Definitely got a Ghibli influence too. The robot does have most of the screentime. The baby bird is also a main character. The fox is a side character that brings comic relief and a friend to both the robot and the baby bird. He helps inform them on what is normal for a animal. They meet the other animals as well and really shows how important community is.

The story pacing is a bit fast, but nothing I felt was too rushed. The writing is really good. As I said before it has made me cry. All the characters have their own likeable personality and they do talk about "dying" in a real but light hearted way. And they are open about prey and predators. Even so none of them are really painted in a "evil" or "antagonist" way.  

Its a great feel good movie! Definitely would recommend for young ones and adults. If you're an animal lover you would enjoy it.

 This show is better than I expected. Its only on Apple tv but the first episode is free to watch. Its a really nice show about grief, family, and friendships. The show revolves around a therapist Jason Segal plays as, his colleagues that Jessica Williams and Harrison Ford plays, his daughter, his friend, and his neighbors as well as his patients. The shows has great writing! Pretty funny and it does get serious and real at some moments. Very relatable too. Acting and pacing has been great too!

 Since I watched this for Harrison Ford, I will say he's great in it! Since he's one of the main characters he does get quite a bit of screentime. His character's relationship with others is entertaining. His character has Parkinson's and puts up a wall around himself that the show revolves around him slowly opening up to the people he cares about. Definitely a great character for Harrison to play. 

This show has gotten to me emotionally. It has some really great character growth. So far it has 2 seasons out and a 3rd seems to be in the works. I definitely recommend it and wished more people watched it!

I've started to watch more media that Harrison Ford is in since I realized he's in his 80s and its been awhile since I've seen him. So I read that he's currently working on two series and one is a him as a cowboy. I just finished the first season and it seems the second one will start in February.

This show is pretty violent but I am enjoying it so far. The show follows 3 people so there's 3 story lines that I suspect are going to converge at some point. The main story is the Dutton family and their ranch over Yellowstone. This time period had a lot of technological changes and other hardships and Dutton's struggle with the changes. This story does have the largest cast so its not all through the main character which Harrison Ford plays. I do like his character and I am enjoying these "old white man" roles Harrison Ford has been acting as. He is still charming and funny. 

The second story line follows another Dutton, Harrison's character's youngest son, who is abroad in Africa as a hunter as he goes through PTSD of being in WWI. Quite a change from the western cowboy so it was refreshing to get back to this character's story line. Also the actor, Brandon Sklenar, is incredibly attractive. I also do love the female character he meets too and I'm starting to see where their story is going to lead into.

The third story is also a huge tone shift. It follows a young teenage native american girl go through cruelty in a school run by a church. It is hard to watch her get beaten but I find it is well done in how they handle it. The acting and writing for this is great too. 

The pacing in this show is great too! None felt too long or too short. Acting is also great! Definitely looking forward to the second season!

I've been using proxy service to buy things from Japan for years and there are many and they seem to continue to grow. Especially since the yen to cheap compare to the US dollar. I wasn't satisfied with Zenmarket so I wanted to try Buyee out. I find their service fee cheaper since it doesn't charge per item but per order. You have options to just pay the basic fee or pay more for inspection. 

When I looked up Buyee to see other people experience with it, there are quite a few who were dissatisfied and it seems to they misunderstood what a proxy service is. They would buy and item and get it but aren't happy with it so they try to demand a refund. And they get angry when Buyee doesn't refund them. So here's a BIG warning on proxy service, you can't return items! They are just a middle man and aren't going to go through the return process over your items that you want to return. please keep in mind this risk! Don't go using it to buy something expensive or rare on the auction site or mercari since it might be a scam. Mercari now offers listings directly from Japan now and Mercari may be more willing to give you refunds. 

What I find useful with Buyee is that they have discounts. Before mercari opened up internationally, I would use Buyee to buy from Mercari. And would take advantage of their discounts for Mercari as well as Rakuten. You can order from within their site or use their extention to add things to your cart from the shopping site itself. I personally like going through the actual site to shop since not everything gets listed on Buyee when you try to search for it. 

Buyee has a separate page with all the items you put in your cart and it divides them by store. It also tells you how much it will be in your currency. This price does change with the exchange rate too. 

Once your complete an order, the order will move to a different page with status bar for when they buy it to when its in the warehouse. Once it reaches the warehouse it will start a countdown timer on its free storage days. It will also tell you an estimated weight and price for shipping it internationally.

And once you paid for international shipping your order will again move to a different page to track your shipped items. So far I have good experience with Buyee. None of my items arrived damaged or missing. I do wish they had DHL as a shipping option. Most of my packages were shipped by EMS which is pricey sometimes.

You can also have them order from a shop not supported by their extension which I have done. Even on sites that have a competitor proxy service pop up on it. But there are some shops that don't allow proxy services. I tried to order from TORCH TORCH and it was canceled because of that. This process does take longer than buying from Mercari or Rakuten. And it put into its own cart page separate from the others. But it will go to the same Ordered and Shipping page.

Customer service so far I've had a good experience with. They mostly contacted me about my order that I'm missing a detail. Once was a shirt that had a personalized option that I didn't fill out. And another time was about chocolates I wanted to buy but since the weather was warm it required ice packs. If you have Discord, they have their own server and you can open up support tickets in there which I find to be a better way to get help.

One negative experience I have is that they wouldn't help me get mochi. The mochi I wanted is fine to be shipped but Buyee's agents told me they don't buy mochi of any kind because they deem it as perishable and told me their warehouse isn't equipped to handle such food items. The mochi I wanted to get isn't at all perishable since I've had it in snack boxes so it was frustrating to not be able to get it because I wanted to try their other flavors.

Overall I am liking Buyee and will continue to use it!

For my birthday I wanted to treat myself to macarons since its been awhile since I had them and I was craving them a bit. I was glad to see that Laudree can ship their macarons nationwide since I've been wanting to try them and there are none near me.

The selection on what they ship is limited. There are different boxes with a set number of macarons. I think the most disappointing is the lack to choose your flavors. You are just given what they have available. Their flavors are pretty simple and elegant. They don't really tell you all their flavors on their site. Anything else they offer like cakes and other baked goods seem to only be pick up only.

I chose a box of 15 which cost $61 which makes each macaron $4.07 which is rather high. Plus they only have overnight shipping so you have to add $25 to the total which came out to $86 that I got charged for my order. Which makes each macaron cost $5.73 each! Luckily you can choose a date of when you wanted it to be delivered. 

Since my birthday is during the holiday season I had to order a few days in advance. I chose my birthday but with the delays its not guaranteed. They ended up shipping it out on my birthday and I got it the day after. They use Fedex and since it was raining my box was wet when I got home. They packed it in a sturdy shipping box with a big label saying "perishable" by the address label. The macaron box was in a insulated foil mailer and a ice pack was packed with it. It was tightly sealed and packed thankfully that my macarons and the box arrived undamaged. 

I got the green box and its nice. I will definitely keep it and use it for storing small items. It came with a folded paper with the flavors they have. It didn't listed out all the flavors their website had listed. For example there isn't any Almond or Orange Blossom. They gave me a nice enough variety but its not all the flavors. They even listed some seasonal ones and they labeled which were vegan which is nice. 

I've tried 1/3 of the box and I do like it! They are soft and chewy and not too sweet. Are they worth nearly $6 each? No. But I did enjoy everyone one them. Even the basic flavors like Vanilla are better than I thought they be. The only disappointing part of this experience as the price. Would I order from them again? Yes!

 For awhile I didn’t think a vacuum is worth $1000. And I have read stick vacuums with rechargeable batteries without bags are expensive because it’s a newer technology compared to the bag canister types which makes sense to me. I try not to take “branding” into account since it’s mostly marketing than actually quality of the product. Something a home inspector agrees with me on. But I recently tried out a Dyson vacuums and it does a pretty decent job than most of the vacuums I’ve owned. 

What impressed me was the suctions power. It was able to get sand off my floors and also not spit it back out. I have medium length hair so I was also glad that hair rarely gets into the brushes. And the noise level wasn’t bad at all. I like the ball joint on the head attachments that make maneuvering such a breeze. Attaching and removing heads is pretty easy to do. Sometimes it needs to be at the right angle so it can take me a minute to get it on. 

The bad is the weight. I got one that has a bigger canister which is rather unnecessary for me so I wish I had exchanged it for a smaller one. The canister doesn’t rather dirty from the sand and fine dust. It’s an awkward thing to clean too. I like the design of pushing it out to empty but often times hair will get stuck inside and I’d have to reach into to pull it out. Also I have to remove the attachments to empty which is a pain. 

So far I am pretty pleased with it but I personally don’t think it’s worth the full price. If my salary was more then maybe it’s worth it but there are probably other brands that could do as good a job at a cheaper price. 

 Been curious about ways to handle old and unwanted clothes that aren’t fit for donations. So I found out about Trashie which you buy a big poly bag to fill. The bags have their own QR code and a unique number. When I bought my bags they had USPS as a carrier option but now they changed to only UPS which is pretty inconvenient for me. 

Each bag is about $15 which isn’t cheap. They do multi packs and subscription service if you wanted more. I would definitely wait for a sale or deal if you wanted to try them out. If you get more than one they send them out individually. I got a 3 pack and I got 3 Kraft envelopes with a bag each. This doesn’t seem cost effective to me as having them shipped together. My third one came later. 

So each bag gives you Trashie bucks that you use to redeem rewards. These rewards aren’t great. They’re not giftcards to stores most known about either. A lot are expensive small brands. The money you spent on the bags doesn’t equal to how much you can get back on discounts

I redeemed a discount for Neiwai and tried to use it during Black Friday but it didn’t work since it’s not like a gift card but a discount code. It won’t let me use multiple discounts. 

I also redeemed a discount for Blueland but I didn’t realize it was first order only so that is wasted. So far I’m not having a great experience with Trashie. I don’t know if there’s another like it though where you can send clothes and blankets not fit to be worn to.

 So I’ve delve a bit into dating apps and want to compare them on how they work and what I’ve noticed. This is from a perspective of a woman. I’ve been on these apps out of curiosity and have tried to match with people but nothing too serious. I also haven’t given any of these any money

Bumble So not only can you find a date on this app but they also have separate parts for those wanting to look for friends or career opportunities. You can’t have these active at the same time. What I mean by this is that you won’t get any new likes in your friends or career profile modes if you’re in the dating mode.

I like the prompts they have and other bio features. I feel I can really show who I am the best with Bumble. And each of these others can leave a comment on. If someone leaves a comment they will show up at the top of your Liked You page and it will ask you if you want to reveal their profile which is all free but I think there’s a daily limit. I feel this feature is a great way to stand out compared to the paid SuperLike for just being shown at the top and being able to reveal you with no extra cost.

As I swipe I noticed usually the first person shown is attractive as hell or someone who has Liked me. But if I keep swiping I no longer come across anymore people that have swiped me. The app doesn’t tell me if they like me until I swipe. If I swiped left it will notify me that I missed a match and I will have to pay to go back. When I get SuperLikes they don’t always come up asap. But once they do it will tell you they have SuperLikes you. But again you have to keep swiping until their profile comes up. Sometimes it can take a long time to even find another person that have liked you but this may be due to the allowed distance. My pool of Liked Me people just keeps increasing because none of these people are coming up as I swipe. I feel this might be a design choice to make you pay to show these people to you.

What is nice about Bumble is preventing the men from messaging you first. But if you’re not great at talking like I am it can be a challenge to figure what to say first. 

What I find confusing about Bumble is how there’s a separate Bumble app for just finding friends. This seems separate from the BFF mode in the dating app as I had to do a new profile and none of my Liked Me is transferred ver. 

I didn’t seem to come across scammers or bots on there as much as the other apps. Bumble does require your location and will publicly show the town you’re at in your profile. They do have a Travel mode which requires money if you wanted to change your location but it will make it big and obvious that you are using this mode which is is a nice way to flag people who aren’t there locally 

Hinge This app I get the least amount of pool of people. I do not get as many likes on there. And the weird part is that the people I swiped left to can come back. So it seems your profile will get shown to people you swiped left to again. Even in a big city! 

What I like about Hinge is that you can reveal the people who liked you. The newest one will always be the first one you can reveal and you can only reveal one at a time. They can also leave comments. 

You can manually enter your location. I’m so if you wanted to see people from out of town or even in a different country you can! At no cost! I wish Hinge had more people as this is the least greedy app. Filling out your profile is nice too. I like that you can add a note under what relationship you’re looking for. 

Badoo This app is interesting. It requires your location on the app but on PC you can manually add a location if you denied it access to your location. 

What makes Badoo unique is having a separate page for people nearby. This page shows everyone without a blur which is great! You can tap on a face and it will bring up their bio. You can also send a message and start a chat right away without any swiping or matching. This can be annoying if end up getting spammed but so far I haven’t thankfully. 

Another unique feature of Badoo is the notifications. It lets you know when someone just liked you or even looked at your profile from the nearby page. 

Something wild about Badoo is that it auto gave me a free trial of their paid features. It didn’t notify me until over a day later that it gave me a free trial. None of the other apps have given a free trial. But now that I could see the list of people who liked me, it does help a lot but it does show the kind of people using it which aren’t my cup of tea.

Tinder Signing up was a pain. It’s takes awhile to get started and if you want to get verified this can also take a bit. I thought I was getting banned because nothing worked. I had to close and reopen the app several times to check if it’ll tell me if I was banned or not. I think this is due to that I did try to make an account before and it recognized me? I did look it up and it does seem like that if you got banned it’s possible to make a new account easily by using different photos and different phone number. There’s a ID verification too which I’m not sure what this really proves other than having your name and age the same. 

What I notice right away is bots. Super attractive people with nothing in their bio. If you swipe on them they will match with you and it was easily to detect they’re a bot from just chatting with them.

This app is obviously the most known and there does seem like a huge pool of people and more attractive too. I do like that it does tell you if they liked you if their profile comes up. What is weird is that I have to do taps on the sides to pull up their bio instead of scrolling up and down which every other app does. It shows multiple colored icons on the bottom which aren’t explained. There’s a superLike which is the blue star and the purple lightning which is the boost which I’m not sure what it does. Tinder also has profiles that are not only empty but used photos that had no people in them. It will tell you if they’re nearby or active. 

Writing your bio is a bit limiting not as many opportunities to really express yourself. I do like that it has an option to say that you’re looking for friends but this probably not a popular thing on Tinder. There is a neat Explore page where you can choose the kind of vibe you’re going for and show you people who they think falls under it. One is Gaming, another is Free Tonight, and quite a bit more! Not sure how they determine who falls into what since it’s not something you can choose to be in.

One of the benefits of Tinder is that since it’s well known there are extensions that can unblur photos. Sadly Tinder doesn’t let you scroll through the whole list so you can’t see everyone. 

 Oats Overnight ads popped up on Instagram for me and thought it seemed like an easy breakfast. I'm not the type to like sweet breakfast but I thought I try it out just for the summer season. The cold would be refreshing in the heat. 

I got the box that came with a free shaker. They're oatmeal mixes are drinkable but you can use less milk to make it a more traditional oatmeal bowl which is what I wanted. The shaker is bigger than I expected but it serves well to mix the oatmeal with milk. There are oz labeled on the bottle. The 6oz is clearly labeled but the other numbers aren't painted so its hard to see the numbers since I need 4oz for the traditional way to make it.

Each pack has about 1/4 cup of powder and oatmeal. Its mostly powder than rolled oats. I feel I could add my own oats to it but obviously the flavor would get more diluted. The flavor is rather moderate so its not too intense to make it seem like a desert. I got one pack for each flavor to try them out. So far there's more flavors I didn't like than ones I did like. 

Personally I feel it is a bit overpriced for some powder and oats but its not bad. Some do have that protein and vitamins taste so definitely find the flavors that you like the best.

 I have previous mentioned Zenmarket as a proxy service option. Now I want to write a post on after using it for several years. I’m doing this because they recently changed some things which isn’t good in my opinion. 

One change that I think makes sense is increasing the fee from 300 yen to 500 yen. The inflation and current exchange rate between yen and usd, I can’t hate them for increasing it since everywhere else is increasing their prices. 

The change I don’t like is their rewards. Before the change, if you ship packages from them within 12 months they will give you a certain amount of credit that you can use to buy something through them. The credit is the same idea as a credit card  you will have to pay the amount back. But they have changed that from 12 months to 3 months! I don’t buy that often enough so I’ll never get that benefit anymore. 

This company also has branched into selling certain things themselves  even subscription boxes. I even bought a ramen box from them but sadly customs has taken 5 out of 7 of the ramen in the box! Leaving me with only 2. I contacted both zenmarket and customs. Customs says it contained meat products prohibited in the US. Zenmarket won’t take any responsibilty and won’t help give me any of my money back. They don’t list full ingredients for these ramen either  their website only lists the warning of meat products that could be prohibited on their FAQ page  

I find services like Blackship to have a much clearer information on what is allowed and what isn’t. I would highly advise going there to research what is allowed in your country before buying anything outside your country  

Another time I tried to order a product that had a limit of one per customer. I asked Zenmarket to check if they could buy it before I give them money. Unfortunately they couldn’t even do that  they have to try buying the item before knowing which is weird to me. 

Zenmarket is still one of the easiest and cost effective proxy service but I fear their quality in customer service has decreased.