Isaac Shapiro

The greatest pillar holding up the entire series of My Hero Academia is All Might. He’s the classic superhero archetype. Basically imagine Superman filtered through the lens of shonen manga and you have All Might, and I think a great part of the series's core appeal lies with him, and how he’s the Superman archetype done right.

Tomura Shigaraki is a terrible villain. But here’s the thing: What I love about him is his terribleness is it’s completely by design, and that’s what makes his arc so fascinating. Now when I say Tomura is a terrible villain, I mean that not in the sense that he’s a bad guy who does terrible things. No, he is terrible in the sense that he’s not very good at being a villain.

I had a startling revelation recently about Harry Potter that completely changed how I view the series. It all happened when I was on vacation and bought Stephen King’s son Joe Hill’s most recent book, The Fireman. It’s been compared to his version of his father’s post-apocalyptic story The Stand. The Fireman is a tale about a world being burned down by a mysterious fungal spore that cause people to spontaneously combust. The main protagonist gets infected shortly after she gets pregnant. Her last dying wish is to somehow give birth to her child while staying alive amidst a world that is quickly burning down. If you have no idea how this relates to Harry Potter, just give it a minute.

Rogue One has been an absolutely smashing success amongst fans and critics and is likely to become another huge hit. The film was risky seeing how it’s technically the first big budget Star Wars film that doesn’t feature Jedi or any member of the Skywalker family. But what it does show that there is an audience that is desperately hungry to see new portions of the Star Wars universe explored?

When my grandpa passed away, he didn’t want to be buried. He also didn’t want to be cremated and have his ashes kept in an urn or thrown off the side of a mountain or into the sea. You see there’s this company that compresses your remains and make a vinyl record from them. You can have just about anything printed on it. If want you can record your own karaoke rendition of Don’t Fear the Reaper played by the carbonized remains of your mortal form. Personally, I kind of found it a little creepy. It felt like you were having your body preserved by a taxidermist then having yourself mounted in a rocking chair forever.

I've always been a huge video game snob. I've followed the industry for years; while other 12-year-olds were outside, skating around parking lots, I was inside, busy reading the latest news from E3 press conferences. I'd like to think that one day, maybe 20 years from now, when a bunch of French dudes sit around and develop the video game equivalent of auteur theory and make it cool to name drop famous game designers in casual conversation (like Hideo Kojima, Warren Spector, Shigeru Miyamoto and Peter Molyneux), I'll be vindicated for all of the time I've spent glued to my screen and following the industry.