Griff's Village

I've always been interested in folklore. I remember falling in love with Greek mythology while watching  Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess  as a kid, and this passion steadily grew throughout my teens. I'm especially fond of mythical creatures, and have been for as long as I can remember.  Many of my favourite mythical creatures are yōkai. If you're into Japanese entertainment, then you've almost certainly seen at least some. You probably know what a kappa is, or you've heard the term "oni" before, or you know that racoons (or "tanuki") keep shape-shifting in video games and anime. Those are all yōkai, and there are many more that the average westerner has never heard of. This passion brought me to the works of Toriyama Sekien, an 18th-century Japanese artist and writer who is best known today for his illustrations of yōkai. Many of the creatures he drew were taken from Japanese folklore, but he'd also made up his ow...

I love food, unfortunately. I'll look at a restaurant menu days before I eat out, then spend those days fantasizing about how the food will taste. I like chocolate, I like cheese, I like sandwiches and chips and fries and burgers and pizza and all the stuff that's worst for my body. I don't much care for exercise, either. I am getting better at portion control, though. I used to get an appetizer and dessert whenever I ate out. I almost never get an appetizer now, and I only sometimes get dessert. I haven't given up soda, but I almost exclusively drink diet. (I know this still isn't good for me, but at least it's bad in a less fattening way.) I haven't given up any of my favourite foods, but I am more restrained in terms of how much or how often I eat them. And I'm getting better at physical activity. I walk all the time, and I have a miniature pedal bike under my desk so that I can pseudo-walk while I'm working. (I'm doing it right now, while ed...

A local community theatre will be putting on a production of Ken Ludwig's BASKERVILLE: A SHERLOCK HOLMES MYSTERY in about a week. I am not going to write about Sherlock Holmes, though. At least not today. When I was a student, I never took part in extracurricular activities. I was never into sports, I preferred being on my own, and I wasn't interested in spending my downtime at school. It wasn't until I got older that I started to think about the experiences I had missed out on. In late 2023, my therapist advised me to get out of my comfort zone. Orders are orders, so I thought back to my days as a student, asking myself what I should have done differently. I don't like sport any more now that I did then, but I've grown to love the art of storytelling even more. If I could go back to high school, I'd have joined the theatre club. Not as an actor, but in a behind-the-scenes capacity. I already have a diploma, so going back to high school isn't really an optio...

I recently read Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories , a collection of short stories by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, translated by Jay Rubin. Akutagawa is one of Japan's most celebrated writers, but, for most of us in the west, he's most notable for "In a Grove" and "Rashomon," which provided the plot and name, respectively, for one of Akira Kurosawa's best-known movies. I'd be lying if I said that his connection to Kurosawa had nothing to do with my decision to check this book out, but I don't want to imply that Akutagawa is little more than a cinematic footnote: his short stories are some of the best I have ever read. While enjoying this book, I often thought about the language barrier. When you're watching a foreign movie, the picture is, for the most part, unaltered, so much of the artistry (the lighting, set design, costumes, and cinematography, for example) is preserved. Words are different; you can't really see a writer's words through...

I've been interested in the public domain for a long time. When I was an unemployed, carless twenty-something, I liked knowing which works of classic Literature I could find for free online. To this day, there's something very satisfying about downloading P.G. Wodehouse's A Damsel in Distress or Maurice Leblanc's Arsène Lupin versus Herlock Sholmes from Standard Ebooks and loading them onto my eReader. Some people always get excited about Public Domain Day, but this year's has been one of the biggest because of soon-to-be horror icon Mickey Mouse's new legal status. It's funny to think that Disney, a company who embodies art and commerce in almost equal measure, has lost even a little bit of control over one of the world's most recognizable characters. The same thing happened when Winnie-the-Pooh entered the public domain a few years back.  It was Walt Disney, and not A.A. Milne, that made the idea of Pooh as a slasher villain so appealing. A lot of ch...

I've always been a fan of the Mario games. When I was a kid,  Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars,  released in 1996, was probably my favourite. For the first time, gamers got to play a story-focused Mario adventure. And what an adventure! The thought of an enemy so dangerous that Mario and Bowser had to team up left a big impact on my ten-year-old self. Now it's 2023. The remake, still called Super Mario RPG , but with the Legend of the Seven Stars subtitle dropped, has been available for a few weeks. But how does it hold up? Should you play Super Mario RPG ? Should you play Super Mario RPG on the Nintendo Switch? And should you play Super Mario RPG on the Nintendo Switch if you already own the original? It's fashionable for gamers and gaming critics to say that a remake renders the original obsolete. Super Mario RPG on the Switch complements the original Super Nintendo version, but I don't think it's a good replacement. Yes, this new release adds severa...

I recently attended a performance of William Shakespeare's Twelfth Night.  It got me thinking about the age-old debate over plays, and whether they are to be read or watched. It's a discussion that seems to follow the Bard of Avon more than any other writer. My first direct exposure to Shakespeare's literature was in a high school English class, when I read  Romeo and Juliet . I already knew who Shakespeare was, of course, but this was the first time I experienced one of his masterpieces first-hand. At fourteen, I still struggled with understanding the play, but I enjoyed it, found the footnotes fascinating, and looked forward to studying Shakespeare's other works in future English classes. In the summer I turned 17, I bought a collection of Shakespeare's plays, and read both Much Ado About Nothing and  Hamlet on my own ;  the latter would soon show up on the syllabus in my last year of high school. I would soon after become an English major at Carleton University,...