S H I E L D H O U S E

        Well, I guess I can't deny it any longer. Summer is over, bringing another season of anime to an end. Evidently, I have been very busy over this summer (hence the lack of posts coming from me), but I did keep up with a decent amount of anime. That being said, there was a few that I missed out on and will need to check later. Regardless, here's a look at what I looked at this Summer 2018. What I Watched Airing This Season Steins;Gate 0     This being the headline anime should come as no surprise to anyone who even remotely knows what my favorite series are. I am a huge Steins;Gate fan. I have played both the visual novels that the anime adapts multiple times, as well as rewatched the first Steins;Gate anime enough that I almost remember the exact numbers for each of the world lines. Heck, I even did an Okabe Rintarou cosplay at Fan Expo this year. So does that make my short review bias? Probably, but I did have very high expectations for S...

       The spring season of anime has come to an end, with remaining shows for the most part wrapping up this Saturday. Spring 2018 was on the quiet side, at least in terms of new original anime, but there was a handful of big name sequels airing to keep fans satisfied. Here's what I've been up to during this anime season. What I Watched Airing This Season Darling in the FranXX        Continuing from a strong first half that aired over the winter, Darling in the FranXX set up a large hype following, with many expecting this Trigger and A-1 Pictures anime to be a revival of the mecha genre. With mecha continuing to be more and more of a niche genre- a far cry from its glory days -what better a studio than Trigger, who is composed of ex-Gainax staff of Gunbuster, Evangelion, and Gurren Lagann fame, to bring back a resurgence in popularity?  It certainly looked that way during Winter 2018, with interesting character developments, and a ...

Release Date: June 8th 2018 Label: GOOD Music, Def Jam Album Link      Hot on the heels of fan polarizing album ye , Kanye West returns with Cleveland born hip hop artist Kid Cudi, famous for 2009's Man on the Moon: The End of Day . Together they've debuted under the name KIDS SEE GHOSTS, dropping a self-titled album in the process. The collaboration between the two is nothing new of course; Kanye noticed Cudi back in 2008 at a Def Jam meeting, and has acted as Cudi's mentor ever since. The two worked together on Kanye's 808s & Heartbreak , an album that would shape the future of not only Kid Cudi, but other popular rappers today such as Drake, Frank Ocean, Childish Gambino, and B.o.B. West also served as executive producer on Man on the Moon: The End of Day , and Kid Cudi continued to work with Kanye on all of Kanye's future projects. The creation of this new group was announced back in April 2018, and production on this album started over following Kanye We...

Part of a stacked "second generation" lineup of Solid State Records, a then young label, Haste the Day is an American Christian metalcore band from the state of Indiana. Although they were never anything as groundbreaking as other Solid State bands of the time (see Underoath, August Burns Red, and Norma Jean), Haste the Day represents a decade of the perfection of 2000's era metalcore. What makes Haste the Day such a stand out band is their genuine energy, familiar song structure, and catchy hooks & choruses. Admittedly, I only got into the band at the dead end of their career with the release of "Attack Of The Wolf King", but as my tastes and opinions have continued to open up and grow since then, Haste the Day has remained as a band that I can always put on shuffle and have a good time. As such, I thought I'd go through the band's discography and rank the albums top to bottom, as well as give some of my personal thoughts on each of the albums,...

     As someone who once despised anime and used to view it as one of the lowest forms of entertainment, I am a firm believer that there is good anime out there that can hook anyone, regardless of their disposition, or experience with anime. Maybe you were one of those 90's kids who used to watch Pokemon, Dragon Ball Z, and/or Sailor Moon, but never really watched anime outside of that. Perhaps you're not interested in anime because it's hard to follow subtitles, or because anime is generally over-sexualized (I assure you that's a generalization). Heck, maybe you're like everyone else on the planet and you're looking for something to save you from going on your seventeenth The Office re-watch. I guarantee there's something out there that will open you up to anime.      So where do you start? Well luckily for you, Netflix has a growing, very solid selection of anime to watch. With the assumption that you are the normal person with access to Netflix, I'm...

A friend of ours from the Out of Tune Podcast  (check them out, they do good talks about music), Dillon Heywood, recently nominated me on Facebook to post "ten all time favorite albums that really made an impact and are still in rotation." Rather than make a quick Facebook post, I thought I'd put together a blog post to kind of give people an idea of what my background with music is. For this list, I'm not going to give an explanations of my choices, but as a bonus I will include my favorite track from each of the ten albums. Obviously, this list reflects my personal favorites as of the current date of this post, and doesn't intend to stand up to any critical objectivity. Also, this list does not contain any recent albums, but more so albums that have stuck with me through the years. So without further ado, and in no particular order... My 10 All Time Favorite Albums: 1. Daft Punk - Discovery 2. System of a Down - Toxicity 3. Rush - Moving Pictures ...