PixlBit

Oh boy, 1994. I believe i was struggling to find a job I liked that year. I distinctly remember sitting in a diner with my girlfriend using the last shred of money on my credit card and wondering what to do next. I had been trying to be a videographer but only did one gig before I was at a loss how to proceed. I tried to get a band together from the talent at my mental health support group, but it wasn't going well. Many of my friends there were much worse than me and had some difficulty keeping focus. I separated myself from all that and then had a few jobs that didn't last very long, but were interesting. It was a uncertain, bumpy ride that year, but there was good media to absorb at least. 

TV:

I very much enjoy The Tick; so much so that I hunted down all the original comics and read them. The TV show is chock full of jokes. If you watch the backgrounds there are all sorts of sight gags and little references I just love to find. The Tick went three seasons. It has a celebrity guest star voicing the villain in each episode. It became a problem later on because some of the episodes are not on the DVD sets because of licencing issues. I used to have all the DVDs and the files of the missing episodes. Ben Edlund wrote the comic, the animated series and two live action series.I didn't enjoy the live action Tick nearly as much as the animated series. This series is always on top of my all-time lists of TV shows. 

Film:

I really enjoy black & white cinematography, B-movie scifi and comdy. This film has all of that. It's about a real life B-movie film maker from the 50s, Ed Wood, notorious for making so-bad-they're-good films like Plan 9 From Outer Space. It's great fun to see the behind-the-scenes trainwreck of an Ed Wood production. Ed Wood is played by Johnny Depp. Walter Mathou does a great job at playing an aged Bela Lugosi and even won a supporting actor award for it. The film is delightfully weird and funny, two of my favorite words. 

Games:

Lots of good games this year, but I can't avoid the gorilla in the room, Donkey Kong Country. I gave myself blisters playing this on the SNES at the time. I never beat the game, but I loved replaying all the levels up to Kremkroc Industries. It's great to switch from DK to Diddy for different parts and find all the rides which open up new areas and make the levels go faster. There are also secret barrel paths you can take to short cut an entire level. You just had to know where to jump off the screen to begin the wild ride. The soundtrack is great. My favorite being Aquatic Ambiance used in the underwater bonus levels. I generally don't like platformers but this one was a little more like an aciton/adventure game, so I really got into it. 

Music:

I was really obessed with this album at the time. "Lightning Crashes" was my favorite song off it, but I liked everything on the album. The band is from my home state Pennsylvania, in York. I strangely remember exactly where I was when I heard it for the first time on the radio in my car. Remember radio? That's where new songs used to gain their popularity until the matrix, I mean, the internet took over. 

Books:

I was a child of the Voyager missions to the planets in the 70s and was fascinated by its progress into the 80s and beyond. I watched Carl Sagan's Cosmos series on TV in the 80s. I took an astronomy course in college, and in the 90s, I started watching astronomy lectures through The Teaching Company. In the 2000s I listened to Neil deGrasse Tyson's podcast Startalk, read his books, and watched some of his version of Cosmos. So astronomy has always been in the sights of my telescope (I don't have a telescope). 

I haven't read this book yet, but I will when I find a copy. It was one of Carl Sagan's last books before he passed on. I'm still interested in the subject today but not as much as I was then. It seems trivial considering the problems going on on planet Earth right now. However, I still think about the problems of space travel, the new discoveries regarding oort clouds, dark matter, black holes, etc., and contemplate the unimaginable size of the universe.