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Review

Quip Toothbrush Review

It seems like if there is a product out there that everyone needs, there is a subscription service that will send it right to your door. From food to razors, having subscriptions has taken on a whole new meaning to mean so much more than just magazines and newspapers. Being a college student, I have tried many a subscription service. From beauty boxes, food delivery services, or even my Amazon Student Account that seems to always remain. However, there is one service that I think is totally worth it and that is for something that may seem a bit odd; and that is Quip. What is Quip?“Quip was founded to prove that good design would have a bigger impact on oral health than quick fix gimmicks.”This electric toothbrushes journey began at a family dentistry practice in New York, and a suggestion to use “the cheapest electric brush available” to fight the major and very common problem of brushing too hard.   In terms of subscription costs, you have a range of options from enough for 1 person, to…
Score: 1.07

Curology: An Honest Review from my Experience to Cure Acne

My skincare journey has been a struggle since day one.  From pills to creams, if it’s got acne-fighting in the title or is marketed as an acne cure, then I have probably tried it. After years of not finding anything that made the acne totally go away, I settled for a product that just made my acne manageable.   This all changed about two and a half months ago. Now I will not say that I am not a social media platform user, but up until this point I had never clicked on a Facebook ad - because frankly, I thought they were all just clickbait sites. You know the ones, the ones that have some bright, vibrant videos that show almost impossible skin clearing results. But after doing some research and following up with some friends, I decided that maybe this was worth the money. That product being, Curology.      Background on Curology   Here is what the company website has to say about Why Curology?   “While practicing in suburban New Mexico in 2013, Dr. David Lortscher was having a routine follow-up…
Score: 1.08

Why A Death Note Adaptation Is So Hard

    Everybody's Mad At Netflix  If you have to ask "Why, what did Netflix do this time?" Consider yourself blessed, because the Internet storm that ensued in the wake of Netflix's adaptation of the classic manga series Death Note was deafening.  Some protests were over the white-washing of the series, where this award-winning, best-selling manga written by Japanese artists Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata, filled with Japanese characters and set in Japan, was re-set in America and re-cast with white people.  Yes, that's an issue too. But the casting was just one gripe among many, the main one being that it was apparently made by people who - there is no nice way to put it - were just too stupid to understand anything about the series.  Behold the below review, and you'll appreciate how much I held back anyway:      The fundamental flaw with Netflix's adaptation is squarely pinned to the script. There is no logic to it at all. They ripped out everything in the manga and anime series they could get their…
Score: 1.1

Leave The Star Wars Holiday Special Alone!

It's a Christmas tradition in geek culture as ingrained as Magic: the Gathering booster pack stocking stuffers: making fun of the Star Wars Holiday Special.  And well we should: It has definitely not aged well, to damn it the faintest.  Reviewing it is a guaranteed hit on YouTube, so every major reviewer has a shot at it.  Let's get a few out of the way:  The Nostalgia Critic has the funniest review, hands-down:      The Cinema Snob has a great runner-up:      Dark Corners has a shorter, sweeter review:      Even geek-culture webcomic classic XKCD just had to take a swipe at it. The Star Wars Holiday Special is the very definition of "low-hanging fruit."    Yeah, and you know what? YOU'VE ALL GOT IT WRONG!  You young Millennial whipper-snapper Star Wars fans, I'm sorry, but you can take the next Star Tours shuttle express to planet Get Off My Lawn! There are a whole four decades of cultural and historical context you're all ignoring. What else do you do, break into Egyptian pyramids and graffiti critiques next…
Score: 1.24

Best Magic! the Gathering Sealed Products - A Guide to Strategic Investment in Magic: The Gathering

      "Many Magic: The Gathering players ask the question…" Don't you ever get tired of mocking the Professor of Tolarian Community College with that opening? The answer is no, we don't. Even though we love the Professor, and this post is partly inspired by his YouTube channel's content, he's just irresistible to mimic. Not to mention, if he were here reading this, he would probably disagree with the majority of what we're going to be saying here.  The Professor, spoiler alert, usually poops on Wizards of the Coast's boxed products. He tends to have a pessimistic view of boxed value products and has the annoying habit of counting every penny of literal card resale value as if that was the only metric of concern to players.        Pro players will also tell you: NEVER buy the sealed product no matter what, just buy singles from second-parties. If you're a tournament-playing spike, this article is likely not for you - not that you'd be grubbing over here in the backwoods of Uncle Petey's territory…
Score: 1.45

The Top Linux Distros for Everyday Use for Everyone

    Those of you elder Ents who still remember the pioneer days of the web may remember that once upon a time your Present Author blogged about Linux. There was a Linux blog; I was well-known in the Linux community, I posted lots of tutorials, HOWTOs, some GPL'ed code, scripts, and the occasional distro or application review. That's where the "Penguin" in my name came from was Tux, the Linux penguin mascot.  Then the great mobile apocalypse happened.        Suddenly, what operating system ruled the desktop didn't matter so much. Microsoft, which ruled the desktop for two decades in the bloody desktop wars, was out of the race for the mobile round, as Google smartly jumped on Linux and retooled it as Android for the mobile age. That previous period of technology history was a caution, let me tell you, kids! Heroes arose and were vanquished, volleys fired, kingdoms established and crumbled, factions divided, I still have the battle scars.      OK, let's move on to today: Linux doesn't need to work as hard…
Score: 1.1

The Biggest and Best Lego Sets Ever

    This may come as a shock to some of you, but… I'm a geek! Geeks are marked by a natural inclination for complex, involved toys and expensive, solitary hobbies. But in between building the ultimate gaming PC or tinkering with Arduino kits to make custom Christmas light patterns, there's one hallmark geek toy that doesn't get brought up much.  I'm talking, of course, about Lego. Sure, we all remember the canonical brick building toy from our childhoods. Back when Legos just came in a loose bucket of bricks and you had to supply the imagination yourself, those were the pioneer days that sorted the true engineers from the chaff.        In recent decades, Lego has abandoned free-form bulk block sets to focus on unique sets intended to build one specific model and only that model. To those of us from Generation X and previous, when we could be trusted to have these foreign thoughts called "ideas" and "inspiration," this new standard for Legos sounds like a fun-spoiler.  But when The Lego Movie (2014)…
Score: 1.09

The Top Games On Android Worth Your Time

    Google may do many things right, but its Play Store is kind of a dumpster fire. Reviews and ratings there are spammed, bought, and gamed mercilessly. So when you want to find a new Android game and go searching for it there, you can forget drawing any useful information on reviews. Every two-bit garbage game has five-star reviews and a million positive comments from bots who all say the same five things.  What's an Android gamer to do? Well, you have to turn to personal peer reviews like the one I'm about to do here. These, in my experience and judgment as a long-time Android gamer, are the top games of all time worth recommending. Now, I have a few standards for these recommendations:   Free is better than paid Ads should be kept to the minimum. Paid content should be optional, reasonable, and not required to play. Paid games should give lots of bang for the buck.   Without further ado (because we don't have space for much doing with a list like this), here's Penguin Pete Trbovich's…
Score: 1.04

Useful Apps On Android You Never Knew You Needed

   Penguin Pete here again! Previously, we talked about the top Android games that have proven themselves over the years as solid gaming. This time, we'd like to devote a whole other article to non-game apps on Android that are also well worth your time - for certain purposes and interests.  Non-game apps are a different ballpark. We all know there's a Twitter app and a Facebook app and even an IMGUR app, so why waste everyone's time posting them? The Twitter app is the only game in town for Twitter; it's not like anybody out there was waiting to download the Twitter app until we give our review. Similarly, there's no point reviewing standard utilities that come on every phone and tablet.  Instead, we will be listing some niche apps with practical uses. Ones you never thought of looking for. And of course, we want them for free or minimal cost, with a minimum of ads and bloat.    Transit    In these days of increased concern about global climate change, environment, and mundane matters like traffic…
Score: 1.03

MTG Arena : The Mediocre Miracle

    So it's Penguin Pete here, your semi-faithful fan of the long-running collectible trading card game Magic: The Gathering, with some good news and some bad news. In fact, both good and bad news are distributed in several discrete bundles, so I'll get around to parceling them out longways here.   bad news: COVID-19 killed paper MTG good news: Wizards made MTG Arena to take up the slack bad news: Wizards designed the game good news: But this time they had Hearthstone to copy bad news: They copied Hearthstone good news: At least this time they copied a decent example so it's just barely playable       First, let's recap How We Got To This Point in Magic: The Gathering (MTG) history.  When MTG first came out in the early '90s, it was going around in my nerdiest friend circles until I had to try it. And I had to say, it was an innovative game. The thrust was that it encoded a hermetic system of magic into cards. Some cards were land cards that could represent the mystical currency "mana," while…
Score: 1.07