To be honest, I generally cannot taste the difference between teas. Furthermore, I generally just do not feel one way or the other about tea. It’s simply boiled water, lightly flavored with leaves. Most tea is simply to subtle for me to have any opinion on. That is not the case here.
This tea, while not overpowering, has a substantial enough flavor for me to notice and to enjoy. It is very good and has a very noticeable citrus flavor to it. I don’t know if they added some lemon or if that is the intrinsic taste of this type of tea, but I notice and I like it.
Many retailers often make similar products to the big brand names under their own brands names. They then mark down the price to be competitive towards the big name brands. This product is one of those.
Nice! (now probably known as Smile and Save) is Duane Reade/Walgreen’s own brand. This product is pretty much identical to what the name brands sell. It’s artificial looking and tasting cheese dip with crackers shaped like dipping sticks. It’s not healthy, nor is it that tasty, but it is nostalgic as I used to love these as a kid.
What really makes these great is that a five pack costs only one dollar. A competing brand like Ritz or Kraft often charge over five times that.
So with all those things considered, this is decidedly a good product at a good price. Taking the comparisons with big name brands aside, this is still unhealthy and doesn’t taste amazing by itself. However, if you were someone who grew up loving snacks like this, indulging yourself for the mere price of a dollar sounds just fine to me.
Four Knights of the Apocalypse is a Japanese comic book and the sequel to the popular franchise, The Seven Deadly Sins. I really enjoy this series and it smartly drops a lot of what didn’t work in The Seven Deadly Sins.
Four Knights of the Apocalypse takes place like ten to twenty years after the end of The Seven Deadly Sins. Percival is a young boy who lives with his grandfather on an isolated plateau to high it reaches the clouds. One day, a knight from the kingdom of Camelot arrives and attacks Percival and kills his grandfather. Percival must now descend the plateau and explore a world he has never seen. On the way, he’ll bump into a bunch of characters from The Seven Deadly Sins series.
In terms of story structure, it’s very similar to The Seven Deadly Sins and the shounen genre in general. A young man must leave his home and go on an adventure. Along the way, he’ll meet a bunch of characters, some of which who’ll join him, others will just be guest characters.
A big part of what makes this series enjoyable is that many of the characters from The Seven Deadly Sins make an appearance. Some of them are the same as before while some have changed drastically. The fun is in learning what happened to these characters that changed them. Not all the characters from the prior series have been introduced yet, but I’m looking forward to more characters making an appearance.
Something I also like about this series is that it drops some of the bad parts from The Seven Deadly Sins. I remember clearly that the moment the story in that prior series started going downhill was when they started measuring power levels in numerical values. Measuring power levels that way is a trope most famously used in Dragonball Z. It pretty much established a power hierarchy, which would then repeatedly be broken as the story progressed. Like clockwork, character would just magically increase their power levels, providing random plot developments/twist for readers. It was a cheap narrative device used to surprise people.
Once Seven Deadly Sins adopted that trope, it started a downward slope where they adopted even more tropes, character motivations started becoming lackluster and the overall story just jumped around from development to development without adequate build up. The series just kind of fell apart for me.
Four Knights of the Apocalypse goes back to its roots with a young man going on an adventure. We don’t know how strong anyone is, only that some people seem dangerous and others extremely dangerous. There’s a sense of discovery here since the world is once again unfamiliar. Of course, different characters will be of different strength and some vague sense of power levels is creeping back into the story. However, it doesn’t feel like a crutch the way it was in The Seven Deadly Sins.
Overall, Four Knight of the Apocalypse is a classic shounen story. There’s action, jokes and a bit of fan service as well. It’s a fun story with a bit of the familiarity of old characters mixed in with the new of the new characters. If you wanted an epilogue for The Seven Deadly Sins, Four Knights of the Apocalypse serves that purpose well. If you wanted a new fantasy adventure without the need to read an entire prior series to understand what’s going on, Four Knight’s of the Apocalypse serves that purpose as well. This is a good enough standalone story.
The superhero genre at this point has been done to death. I’m bored of it and I want something new…ish. Moon Knight fills that need and offers a darker twist on the superhero genre somewhat reminiscent of Netflix’s Daredevil series. I don’t mean that it’s the same kind of story as Daredevil, only that it’s a similarly refreshing change of pace.
Moon Knight is a six episode television series that you can watch on Disney+. It’s part a wider push by Marvel and Disney to put out a bunch of superhero content on Disney+. Accordingly, it also takes place with the Marvel cinematic universe.
Steven Grant is an ordinary guy working in a gift shop in a museum in London. Steven has sleep problems and often has gaps in his memory and sleepwalking problems. Thing start getting weird when the gaps in memories start getting worse and he starts waking up in places he doesn’t remember going to. Eventually, Steven must come to terms that he is not alone in his body and that he is deeply connected to an ancient Egyptian god.
The concept of playing around with memories and the perception of your audience has been done plenty in motion pictures. It’s the perfect medium for playing with audiences. This genre trope is often referred to as the unreliable narrator where what is shown to the audience is not what really happens. Some examples of this narrative device are Memento and The Usual Suspects.
For the first few episodes of this series, we get invited into this mystery where what the protagonist sees is not necessarily what is actually going on. It’s a fun mystery to get thrown into and I was interested to see how things were going to play out.
It was a bit frenetic though and while I followed along with the story pretty well, I know people who had trouble keeping up. It’s a fast paced show that throws a lot at the audience. There are a lot of jarring cuts from scene to scene and a lot of things are not explicitly explained, but implied. I think part of it is deliberately to disorient you as mental health and skewed perceptions are a big themes in this show. Unfortunately, for people who are not invested, it may be hard to follow. I really loved the style of this story.
The protagonist is played by Oscar Isaac and he is phenomenal. Not to go into the plot too much, Isaac must play multiple characters and must constantly switch off between them. Additionally, there’s a depth of emotion in each character that must also be portrayed. It’s just an amazing performance and he definitely deserves an Emmy or something.
Overall, this was a fun change of pace from your standard Marvel show/movie. I hope each show Marvel does in the future continues the trend of trying something new, whether it be in terms of style, pacing or target audience. Doing the same thing over and over again gets old.
This tastes exactly as describer. It tastes like the popular brown sugar flavor of milk tea. Admittedly, it is obviously not as good as freshly brewed milk tea with freshly made brown sugar tapioca, but it’s pretty good for a bottled product.
Elliot's View 