Life of a Blogger: Guilty Pleasures

Life of a Blogger is a weekly feature created by Jessi from Novel Heartbeat where we talk about non-bookish topics. Click HERE for more info!

Hey guys! Starting this week, I'll now be participating in Jessi's awesome feature, which I've been reading regularly in my absence, so that you guys can get a little bit more of an insight into who exactly I am.

This week's topic:

Guilty Pleasures

For someone who likes a lot of crap, I don't really have guilty pleasures. If I like something, even if it's particularly bad, then I don't really feel bad about it. However, I'll talk about some things that I really like that some people I know personally find a bit odd or just bad.

Guess who learnt how to make gifs? Me! Guess who needs to work on getting the frame speeds right? Also me. They're either too fast, too slow, or a bit choppy. Practise makes perfect, though!

I still watch all of the cartoons that I watched as a child. In fact, as I'm writing this, I'm watching Rocko's Modern Life! As a kid, I watched Cartoon Network the most, but now I mainly watch Nickelodeon for cartoons, because they're the only one out of the two that show the cartoons I watched as a kid. Even though they're on late at night. My favourite toons to watch are SpongeBob SquarePants (but only the first four seasons because I'm a bit of a snob and the more recent episodes are just unwatchable sometimes), Ren & Stimpy, The PowerPuff Girls, Dexter's Laboratory, Cow and Chicken, Futurama, and, of course, The Simpsons. I guess the only real "guilty pleasure" out of the cartoons that I watch would be the fact that I can only watch Rugrats on Nick Jr. That feels pretty weird.

I'm very likely the only person that I know person that listens to J-Pop quite a lot. I don't speak Japanese and don't really have any desire to learn how (apparantly it's hard) but I still do enjoy Japanese pop music. It's really fun, the videos are always really well made and sometimes I like it more than Western music. I've listened to J-Pop since I was about eleven but I don't really keep up with many current artists, apart from Kyary Pamyu Pamyu, who has some of the best J-Pop videos I've ever seen. Not many people I know listen to Japanese music and I actually brought some of it to Guides a couple of weeks ago and they just didn't get it. Some of the girls asked if they could look through my iPod and then begged me to put what they wanted to listen to.

Licensed video games have a reputation for being pretty bad most of the time but since they were nearly all that I played as a kid, I can't help but have a soft spot for them. I played a lot of Rugrats, Barbie, Powerpuff Girls, and Simpsons games when I was younger and still do today. Sometimes I play PS1 games more than modern games. You just can't beat that nostalgia factor. The Barbie games are among some of the worst that I've ever played but after thinking about it, I realised that the worst game I have ever played (and it's a licensed one) was My Little Pony: Friendship Gardens for the PC. I enjoyed it at the time (of course I did, I was 3), but looking back on it now, it's a pretty awful game. Maybe it's a good thing that I can't find it. And even if I did find it, it won't work on my computer.

Okay, I fibbed. I do have a sort of guilty pleasure and that is Billy Joel. I grew up listening to Billy Joel (among a lot of other 70s and 80s pop music, thanks to my parents) and I just can't help but liking his music. He does have a lot of good songs, like Piano Man, Goodnight Saigon, and Allentown, but there are a couple that are just a bit cheesy, like Uptown Girl. Yeah, Uptown Girl is totally my jam. Remember that scene in The Simpsons where Homer is in a car with his mum's hippy friends and changes the music to be Uptown Girl and then starts rocking out to it? Y'know, this scene right here? Yup, that's what I'm like. It's so catchy! We Didn't Start the Fire comes a close second in being my jam. I already know all the words but I'm not up to karaoke level yet. Even Billy Joel himself doesn't like performing it live.
Have a few songs for your listening pleasure: Uptown Girl | The River of Dreams | We Didn't Start the Fire | It's Still Rock and Roll to Me | Piano Man | Tell Her About It | The Longest Time | Allentown | All for Leyna | Goodnight Saigon | Just the Way You Are

Do you have any guilty pleasures?