A love letter to Voltorb

There's a lot of hate out there. Some are hated for being pure trash or for looking an awful lot like a cone of ice cream. Some Pokémon, however, are hated simply because they are too simplistic. And this saddens me. Whenever I tell someone Voltorb is my favorite Pokémon, people are surprised. It's an unusual pick, so I'd like to explain today why I love it so much.

Beauty in Simplicity
See, when it comes to Pokémon, I've always liked the most simplistic ones, be it Lotad, Luvdisc, or Ditto. There is elegance in being able to create something iconic with only a few lines. You can draw a Voltorb with ten strokes of a pen (assuming the circle and semi-circle are one stroke each), eight of which are needed to draw its eyes. This is brilliant to me: the eyes are the most vital part of a face, and the pointy-ness of them contrasts beautifully with the Voltorb's otherwise round shape. Rather than shaping the eyes like realistic eyes or like simple circles, Game Freak designed the eyes themselves as though they were angry eyebrows, and it works incredibly well.

Perhaps even more beautiful is how they drew something that abstractly resembles a mouth with only one stroke, without making Voltorb look like a Canadian from South Park. Splitting the body up in two parts, while always showing Voltorb from an interesting angle, makes you instantly aware of how Voltorb looks in a 3D environment.


Mimics and Pokéballs
I've always had a fascination for the Mimic, the classic Dungeons & Dragons monster that made its way in every role-playing game imaginable. There is something incredibly interesting to me when a living creature (perhaps a magical one) disguises itself as a man-made object in order to surprise adventurers. The concept alone creates a lot of questions: where did this thing come from? Why does it disguise itself like this? Is this thing a natural result of evolution, or did some wizard make this thing?

Voltorb is a battery. It has a positive pole and a negative pole, and each as a unique color: one is red and the other is white. This makes Voltorb look a lot like a Pokéball. Did Voltorb make itself look like a Pokéball? Or were Pokéballs designed to look like Voltorb?

I'm fine when people criticize Pokémon like Klefki or Seel for looking like household objects or common animals. I never liked Seel either. But Voltorb absolutely fascinates me, because a Pokéball doesn't exist in our world. Game Freak's staff must have looked at their game and thought "how can we make a Mimic-creature if we don't have traditional chests?" And well, I really love the answer they came up with!

Final Thoughts

Now, there are some other criticisms one can throw at Voltorb. For example, Electrode looks way too much like Voltorb. However, I don't think you can criticize a Pokémon because its evolution is too similar. I personally really dislike Rapidash because it's pretty much just a bigger Ponita with a horn, but I really love Ponita because it is a horse that is on fire. How cool is that? Similarly, I don't care too much for Electrode, but Voltorb is just amazing.

An interesting aspect of both Voltorb and Electrode is their mode of locomotion. One of the reasons I like Voltorb overlaps with the reason why I like Spoink: they don't just walk on two or four legs, or float or fly or levitate. No, they move around a completely unique manner - rolling, in the case of Voltorb. I love this because it's not something that exists in nature (safe for some desert salamanders that roll down hills at times). I am always curious how this way of moving around works, and it really touches on my imagination.

Self-destruct - Voltorb's signature move - is such an interesting attack! I mean, Voltorb is completely designed around it, and what creature literally blows itself up as a means of defense? It's fascinating. Yet another thing I'd like to bring up is that Voltorb's blue shiny form is beautiful.

Seriously, though: if you want to know what good design is, look at Voltorb. The first generation of Pokémon generally just has a lot of good designs in there, because of how simple many of them are. Voltorb may not be a Mimikyu, but I love the little fellow regardless.

Should we save These Memories Won't Last?

Begin this year, cartoonist Stu Campbell released These Memories Won't Last, a webcomic that makes full use of the capabilities of HTML5 and current internet browsers. The webcomic has music, minor animations, and all kinds of visual effects. The work is about Campbell's grandfather and his struggle with Alzheimer's. Cambell uses the medium perfectly to create a both a sense of urgency and a strong haze, as if everything is lost while you are reading it. He wrote the piece in part to preserve the life stories of his grandfather in some way, but odd is it then that he picked the medium most susceptible to changes in technology. 

Even as he was creating These Memories Won't Last, browser updates kept breaking his webcomic. A review by The Webcomic Police just a few months after the webcomic's release already complained about their browser not being able to handle it correctly. As I am writing this, I can no longer access the website... Why would Campbell decide to preserve his grandfather's life in such a fragile medium, in such a fragile form?

Well, being able to reach a large audience is part of it. In an interview with CNET, Campbell stated that, for him, "it's important ... to adapt and present our stories in an easily consumable way." But it goes deeper than that. Campbell notes that people rely on their personal devices to keep their memories, be they photographs or contact information. But, to quote Campbell: "as devices die and software becomes outdated, a lot of these memories might be lost. In a similar sense ... [my grandpa] is also a source of memory and one day he will be lost and so will all his memories ..." And, I suppose, this is the sad truth.

These Memories Won't Last isn't really about preserving the memories of Cambell's grandpa; it is primarily about how information, knowledge, and memories get lost over time. This is clearly depicted in the webcomic itself as each panel disappears once it is read, but it is also how the whole webcomic is set up. Campbell's work here is not supposed to survive: it will disappear just like everything else.

This fits the webcomic perfectly. In the 21 years in which webcomics have been an accessible medium, many works have disappeared and become unavailable. However, many popular webcomics have been saved from this fate. Kid Radd, RPG World, and various other webcomics have been downloaded by fans and reuploaded once the website went down. In the case of Kid Radd, some technical changes had to be made to keep the webcomic functional on current browsers, but it works.

As an Eisner-nominated webcomic, should These Memories Won't Last be protected in a similar way? You can wonder if that goes against the whole point of the webcomic. There would be some technological difficulties, but you'd be surprised what big fans can be capable of. I wonder if archiving it goes right against the point of the work. These are all just stray thoughts at this point that I can't make a consistent thread from, but it is an interesting question nonetheless. I do know that I already feel frustrated that I can't reread it while writing this piece.

Mapping out space

What if we could map out the universe like we do with the Earth and the solar system? We know where the continents are, we know where the eight planets are... say, where is Sirius compared to other stars? You know, brightest star in the sky, actually a binary star? Well, let's grab a map of the Milky Way and find out.

Alright, let's have a look, Sirius is supposedly located 8.6 lightyears away from the Earth. The 10,000 ly bar above is 60 pixels wide, meaning that every pixel covers ~167 lightyears. Oh. It seems like we share a pixel with Sirius. Uhm, let's zoom in.

     Andrew Z. Colvin
Here we have our interstellar neighborhood mapped out in 3D space. It isn't really properly to scale - Tau Ceti is actually further away from us than Sirius is, for example - but it sure gives us an idea of what we actually have around us. All of these stars may be less than a pixel of the Milky Way, but these would be the easiest ones to reach if we tried.

Hmm, have you heard of the Heart Nebula and the Soul Nebula? Those are two absolutely gorgeous nebulae. Here, let me show you a picture of the Heart nebula:

                                      s58y

These two nebulae are approximately 7,000 lightyears away from us. I happen to know that these two nebulae lie between us and the central disk of the Milky Way, but the galactic center lies at least 25,000 lightyears away from the Sun, so you wouldn't even be halfway there if you'd reach these bodies.

The Milky Way has a lot of stuff in it, but what can we find outside of the Milky Way? Well, there are other galaxies, but the only one I can think of it the Andromeda Galaxy. Where exact does that lie? Well, I'm glad you asked! The Andromeda Galaxy is actually the largest galaxy in the Local Group:

     Andrew Z. Colvin

What is the Local Group, you ask? Well, it the largest group of bodies that are pulled towards eachother by gravity faster than they are pulled away from one another by the expansion of the universe. This is why the Andromeda Galaxy and the Milky Way will eventually collide. All of the galaxies in the map above, save for some of the galaxies in the upper-left corner (NGC 3109 doesn't like us), are moving towards eachother. In 3.75 billion years, NASA believes the Earth sky will look like this:

The band on the right is the Milky Way, which you may not be used to seeing because of all the light polussion we're dealing with. The galaxy on the left? Andromeda.

But wait, let's go back to the map again. What other galaxies do we have in the Local Group? The third biggest galaxy seems to be the Triangulum Galaxy. Though it doesn't look like much, it should contain about 40 billion stars. Why didn't I find out about the third-biggest galaxy in our Local Group until this week?

If we look a lot closer to our own galaxy, we find the fourth-largest galaxy in our Local Group: the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC if you want to sound cool). If humanity would ever go to another galaxy, this one would probably be a good pick, seeing its size and proximity. It's only ~163,000 lightyears away from us, after all. If we were able to travel at light speed, the ship's crew would probably evolve into a different species from those who stay on Earth before they'd arrive. 

Ahem, intergalactic travel would be a bit extreme, but at least it's nice to know who your neighbors are. To close this off, I want to just show another picture of the Heart Nebula~

Say... what are those bright stars just to the left of the nebula? Hmm, two of them seem to be the Maffei Galaxies: Maffei 1 and Maffei 2. These two galaxies aren't in our local group, and were actually really hard to find. The IC 342/Maffei Group is a neighboring galaxy-group to our Local Group, though the exact distance is hard to tell. The group is kinda hiding behind the Milky Way, in what we call the Zone of Avoidance. To quote Wikipedia: "The Zone of Avoidance (ZOA) is the area of the sky that is obscured by the Milky Way."It's rather annoying, because other groups in the Virgo Supercluster that are farther away from us, like the Sculptor Group, are more easily studied. 

Still though, all these groups are way too far away from us. No matter what we do, humanity will never be able to reach these galaxies. I like to imagine what the Local Group would look like from Maffei 2, but because of that dang expansion of the universe, we will never know. 

The Animated GIF [repost]

Another repost of a Webcomics Commentary post, because... I just happen to lack inspiration right now. In the mean time, I hope you'll enjoy this :)


After last week’s rather poor post about Homestuck, I wanted to talk about something more basic. In that post, I talked about how webcomics are “multi-media” by definition, but I completely skipped one aspect of this: the animated GIF. Animation in webcomics dates all the way back to Argon Zark in the early 90s, and back in the golden age of webcomics, some discussion existed about whether animation in general has any place in comics. Take this article from The New York Times, for example: "Indeed, [Gary] Groth argued, [Scott] McCloud was hankering after something more like animation or film … It’s a great use of the Web. But it verges on animation." This argument is rather dated, but I think it’s still worth examining. GIF images are way more popular in webcomics today than they were back in 2005, so let’s have a look. This will be an image-heavy post, btw ^_^

What I want to argue today is that a traditional animated GIF is an image. It is “animated” by nature, but referring to it as proper "animation" (or especially “film”) is counter-productive. Film has a structure: it can be used to deliver a narrative or to juxtapose different ideas by placing images in time. Mike Rugnetta of PBS Idea Channel described a GIF as a "self-contained moment … one complete action or one complete thought." I think this idea is particularly important when discussing GIFs in webcomics, as it might be more meaningful than the objective length of a GIF. Let’s see where this can take us.



The panel above might be the simplest example of this in practice. No time passes in this image; the animation is used to communicate a sensation of being drunk rather than a sensation of movement (is there a difference?). Homestuck does this kind of stuff all the time, being it to make something glow or to give a character a little more personality by allowing them to blink.



In theory, the order in which the frames are presented in the above examples isn’t even relevant. Describing these images as “video” seems silly: to me, this has become an image on the internet. I think it’s pretty incredible that drawings and photographs don’t need to be static anymore.

This kind of short “animation” can be found all over, like in this Brawl in the Family strip or this one on Tapastic. The order in which the frames are shown may be important to create a fluent animation (oh, we may have an issue), but the character is committing “one complete action” in these examples

Alright, great, but let’s go two seconds further.



We’re clearly reaching somekind of border to my hypothesis here. This animationis pretty complex and a lot is happening here. Surely, the image is a bit unusual for a GIF, and because of this complexity, the loop has to hang a few seconds on the last frame before it can loop back. There is a resolution to this event shown here. On the other hand, we are still witnessing “one complete action”: Jane fleeing the scene. The lengthy animation is used to communicate some fairly simplistic ideas, in particular how much effort she went through to get out of there while it all seeming rather natural for her to do. The image is showing a nice abscond by a desperate character.

And there are other forms of video that are about this length! Take, for example, this piece of video:

https://vine.co/v/iIuZgVXI092 (Vine linked due to Blogspot limitations)

In my experience, Vines tend to be short and are intended to loop. I’ve seen minute-long vines, but those generally just contain cats being pet or some lizard crawling on a wall. Can these really be compared to what we traditionally mean with "video"? These aren’t the kind of shorts you might find on television or as bonus material on a video: these too are depictions of one complete thought or, as may be, one complete joke. But of course, these are obviously video, right?

Maybe the whole idea of something being either an image or video is a simply a fallacy. Hmmm, let’s try to play around with that idea.

I’m honestly not even sure I based the above graphic on. It is interesting, though, because what I’m suggesting is that the World Wide Web has allowed us to explore the point where video meets static images in a completely new way. The language of the internet is interesting because it is all new. Animated GIFs could never have worked in the real-world. You can call the ancient piece of Japanese animation below a GIF, but it was never used as a GIF. It didn't loop, it wasn't presented on a web page, and it was entirely stand alone. (EDIT: Huh, I just read that it was intended to loop. Oops)



To relate all of what I have said back to webcomics (as I suppose I should do as a webcomics blog), what this results in is an opportunity that no other medium has. Webcartoonists can combine what we know as a static image and what we know as video in ways that have never been possible before. The distinction between the two becomes vague in some cases, and often turns completely meaningless. We can tell jokes through this form that was impossible before the World Wide Web came along, and we can reach senses that we could never reach before. Putting boundaries just so we can say "that’s not a comic!" isn’t useful, because in case you haven’t noticed, webcomics are way more than just "comics".

I guess the point of [Webcomics Commentary] is "look how amazing webcomics are" ^_^;

Ben-Hur (2016) is better than Ben-Hur (1959)

Clearly, this is all subjective, but it sure makes a nice clickbait-y title. To explain why I'm taking this stance, I will have to go through some of the most major differences in the plot of these two films. Specifically, I want to talk about the following three things:

1. Juda's escape from the galleys;
2. The role of Balthazar and Jesus in the greater narrative; and
3. The final scene between Juda and Mesalla.

I want to state out front that the cinematography of the 1959 film is much stronger. The film is simply pleasing to watch. Meanwhile, I do feel the 1959 film is much too long. To me personally, the length of the film actually removes all tension. However, I am much more interested in the themes of the films and how they were executed. So let us start.

Juda's escape

Juda, our protagonist, gets sent to the galleys to serve as a slave by his own brother. This event is the linchpin that starts the whole revenge cycle that takes centre-stage during the story. Though I think the manner in which the two films present Juda's defiance to Rome is fascinating, I think the method in which Juda escapes from the galleys is even more so. In the 1959 film, Juda forms a complex affiliation with the ship commander, Quintus Arrius. The protagonist ends up saving his slaver during a battle, and as a result, Arrius not only frees him, but goes as far as to adopt him as a son. This automatically puts Juda in a powerful position. 

In the 2016 film, Juda escapes the ship by his own means during a badly-directed action setpiece. It is impressive to watch Juda take the lead after all the commanders were slain, and watching Juda drifting on sea for days on end made you understand his pain quite well. But more vital is that once he finally stranded, Juda still wasn't free. Instead, he had to win the favor of Sheik Ilderim. By the time he would compete in the race, Juda still hadn't truly won his freedom back. This is what gave the film its dramatic tension. Where in the 1959 film, Juda is fully driven by his rage, his rage could never destroy him. Competing in the circus in the 2016 film could cost him his life, but Juda doesn't care. He'll get his revenge.

Balthazar and Jesus Chris

A particularly vital difference between the 2016 film and all other Ben-Hur media before it is that it doesn't feature Balthazar, one of the Three Wise Men of the East that supposedly visited Jesus Christ as an infant. The character is entirely absent from the film based on a book titled Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ. The 1959 Ben-Hur film is ultimately about believing in Jesus. It is a celebration of the sacredness of God. In the film, Jesus' face is never shown, raising Him up to a position above mortal men. Meanwhile, Ben-Hur (2016) features Jesus not as God, but as a prophet. He has an incredibly strong presence whenever he is on screen, and is recognized as a vital person by every character. But He is still a man, with a face and a voice. Many miracles happened upon His death - including an awfully ridiculous curing of leprosy - but this was more as a Deus Ex Machina to advance the plot.

It is incredibly interesting to see how 21st century Hollywood adapts a deeply religious work. It does this by changing the primary theme of the film to something strongly related to the original and somewhat obvious. Where the theme of Ben-Hur (1959) was a love for Christ, the theme of Ben-Hur (2016) is love in general - or a bit more specifically: brotherly love. And Jesus plays a role in this as well.

Brotherly love

In the 1959 film, Juda's brother Messala was nearly killed during the chariot race in the circus. As Juda meets his brother on his death bed, he asks for the location of his sick mother and sister. Frankly, he finally got his revenge. Messala dies and Juda lives on happily ever after once his mother and sister get healed. This is not so in the newer film.

In the 2016 film, Messala was nearly killed during the race as well, but Juda doesn't come and meet him again. Instead, he hears of Jesus upcoming crucification and decides to attend. As he watches Jesus being nailed to the cross and witnesses the character's love for the very people that were impaling his flesh, Juda cries. In this film, Jesus isn't important as the Son of God, but as a symbol of love. Earlier in the film, when the viewer can still feel a general hate towards the Romans for what they have done to Juda, prefect Pontius Pilate notes that "Rome" in this film isn't the state: it is an idea. With the line "They are all Romans now," Pilate communicates to the viewer that it is chaos and hate that define the "villain" of the film. Jesus, as an actor of love, is depicted as a perfect opposite to this outlook.

Juda recognizes this when he comes face-to-face to Jesus hanging lifeless on the cross. But it was already to late, wasn't it? Juda returns to the mangled Messala, who threatens to kill him with a knife if he comes any closer. The film ends... with both Juda and Messala finally giving up their feud. Juda hugs his brother, saying he doesn't want to fight anymore, and Messala drops the knife and hugs him back. The camera zooms out and fades to black.

Conclusion and final words

I think the 2016 adaption is the better film because it strays away from the source material not just to focus on a theme that feels dear to me, but because it does it so well. Anything not related to the feud between brothers is either brought to background, removed outright, or changed in such a way to reinforce this theme. It is sad that the new film doesn't feature the same kind of long scenes that made the older film so well-regarded, but the film makes up for that in other places.

Supplementary opinions

I liked the strategizing for the race and the lack of focus on Juda's wife, even if the writing, acting, and cinematography were all rather clumsy. It was clear that the director knew that they couldn't create the same kind of atmosphere as the original had, and he changed the plot to accordingly, such as by showing the two brothers together before Messala left to serve the Roman in order to understand their relationship.

Deathbulge Vol. 1: Prettier on the Outside (repost)

Reposting another old post of mine from Webcomics Commentary. I mean, I don't want to scare people away with Homestuck :p

Every once in a while, I’d like to focus on what I suppose is the opposite of webcomics: comic books. After all, as long as the author wishes it, many webcomics make the leap to print at some point. This week, I’m going to have a look at my most recent buy: the first volume of Deathbulge.

In case you’ve never heard of Deathbulge, it might be worth checking out. The absurdist humor of the series is somewhat comparable to that of Cyanide and Happiness, so be sure to click that random button a few times :)



I’m such a great photographer. The thing about turning webcomics into comic books is that you have to deal with things that just aren’t possible in print. Luckily, web design is usually not too vital for a webcomic, though gifs are a bit difficult to communicate through still images. However, the most usual difference between webcomics and print comics is that the latter doesn’t have the benefits of the infinite canvas. Deathbulge, like many other webcomics, makes use of panels and pages that vary greatly in size. Some are just two panels, others are a hundred. This makes adapting such webcomics to print a challenge, and it may result in…



Whitespace. Well, I’ll be frank, I like the lay-out of the above page. The jokes get a lot of breathing room and none of the pages look too crowded. Other pages (usually consisting of three by three panels) fit on the page perfectly, though they still keep a nice, clean margin. What I like even more is the comic below:



The print version actually has an even better comedic timing than the original. Though it still constitutes as “one whole”, the split between the two halves make it so that the comic actually feels like it has two punchlines.

An abundance of whitespace in a comic book can be criticized, as you pay for every page. It’s somewhat awesome that webcomics result in comic books with a much cleaner feel. And to be fair, the book is already really cheap: just £10 on the Deathbulge store for as long as the sale lasts. It’s quite a bit cheaper than the $25 I’m used to for webcomic books. Even its packaging was great, with the book wrapped firmly in bubble wrap.

In case you’re wondering whether you should buy this book, I’ll leave that choice to you. The webcomic is at least worth checking out, as the variation in its comedy should offer something to a pretty big audience of people. Another reason to buy this book is that Mr. Deathbulge added this amazing bookmark!



How can you say no to that?

Squiddles! (repost)

Seeing as I just started this blog, I figured I might as well copy over some of my better works from my previous blog: Webcomics Commentary. Here's one I was rather happy with, and it may give you an idea of what kind of content I may post here. I have no idea how good it will look on my theme yet either.

... Let’s try to go in a bit deeper this week. There will be some minor Homestuck spoilers in this one.

Squiddles Is a children’s cartoon intended for kids between 1 and 6 years old. The cartoon has since branched off into multi-media territory, including a popular toy line. The creator of the series was inspired to start a children’s cartoon by the eldritch horrors that appear in the eternally pitch-black sky of the dark gothic planet that they find themselves on in their dreams. At least, that’s what must have happened in the universe of Homestuck. Squiddles is, perhaps luckily, only fictional.

These creatures are, to use a cliché, fucking metal. They literally created the universe inhabited by the Troll species (which, in turn, created the universe we live in). Also, when one of these creatures died, its final cry killed off (to round it up) 100% of the Troll population, spread over their entire universe. They are literally referred to as “Horrorterrors”. Some “Derse Dreamer”, then, must have looked up at these monsters and thought “wow, I suddenly feel really inspired to write a kids cartoon!” It’s ridiculous!

The main reason I’m rather obsessed with Squiddles is because its existence is such a beautiful combination of baby fodder and Lovecraftian horror. The creatures really are cute, and you may be hardpressed to find anything particularly objectionable in the show. From what we’ve seen in the webcomic, it seems like Squiddles is much less creepy than something like Ren and Stimpy or Courage the Cowardly Dog. But even without having ever seen a single frame of the show, I know that it isn’t as pure as it may seem.

It is easy to fantasize about what the Squiddles TV show may have been like, in particular because its soundtrack can actually be found on Bandcamp. It’s actually one of the many pieces of Homestuck music that was made by its Music Contribution Team. Hussie sadly never used much of it, as Squiddles never took on a larger part of the plot, but there’s a lot of content to dig into. Most of the Squiddles! album is actually pretty cute: it’s better music than you would expect for a cartoon with such a young demographic, but it’s not unthinkable. “Mister Bowman Tells You About the Squiddles” is a catchy call-and-response song that could get anyone to sing along, and basically everything in the first half of the album is simply nice atmospheric cuteness. However, as you’re listening to it, the cracks begin to show. The backstory of villain Skipper Plumbthroat feels surprisingly real and sad, one of the Squiddles’ mothers was killed by a unicorn, and even songs like “Mister Bowman …” don’t feel entirely right. These are not the kind of things you expect from a cartoon with the same target audience as Dora the Explorer and Sesame Street. The album completely breaks down at the end, with the “End Theme” including lyrics such as

• “So let them get to bed right now, so they can rest and make cute sounds … Plumbthroat in his fishing boat – is gonna kill the Squiddles if they don’t get any sleep. So let them sleep.
• “Because they will die if they don’t get any sleep.
• “Plumbthroat has thing for killing insomniac jellyfish.
• “It’s not a pretty sight.”

This is messed up.

But Squiddles! isn’t my personal favorite Homestuck album just because of its creepy background. It’s also genuinely beautiful, and I can’t stress that enough. “Friendship is Paramount” has this beautiful high-pitch melody with awesomely atmospheric bridges, while songs like “Tentacles” and “Lazybones” bring in some real character. “Ocean Stars” suggests an absolutely gorgeous water landscape like you expect it in a Shinkai Makato film, and songs like “Sun-Speckled Squiddly Afternoon” is the kind of background music I want to hear while just sitting in my yard in the sun chilling. Squiddles! has a lot of variety and is really memorable.

If Squiddles were an actual cartoon, I’d probably want to watch it. Just thinking about its eldritch repercussions makes me feel excited. It may be difficult to understand if you haven’t read Homestuck (it may even be difficult to understand if you have!), but this primitive-looking cartoon is one of my favorite things of the whole webcomic.

Welcome to The Maple Tree

I will take a while to get used to this website, but in the mean time, I'd like to welcome any readers to my blog and give a brief introduction. I'm Maplestrip, a 21 year-old non-binary person who lives in the Netherlands. I am highly interested in modern culture and keep track of topics ranging from cartoons to video games to anime. Some of my biggest interests include webcomics and certain types of YouTube videos.

I'd like to use this blog to practice my writing skill, write about various topics that interest me, and to give coverage to ideas that I believe don't get enough of it. 

I hope you'll enjoy my blog. I hope I'll enjoy my blog. This is really only a test message, but I tried to give a brief glance at what this blog will be about.

Have a good day <3