From scientist to star: Marvel's Natalie Portman embraces the new Jane Foster for 'Thor: Love and Thunder'

Nearly a decade after she last walked off a Marvel set, Natalie Portman is back, reprising her role as Jane Foster in a very different way in the upcoming blockbuster Thor: Love and Thunder.

Fans of the Marvel Cinematic Universe first saw Portman portray Jane Foster in the first two installments of the Thor franchise, which released in 2011 and 2013. After being excluded from the third movie, Portman’s six-year MCU hiatus came to an end when Jane appeared during brief flashbacks in Avengers: Endgame. However, those moments in Endgame consisted solely of unused footage from the first two movies, so she didn’t actually have to shoot any new scenes.

This time, Jane won’t just be some brainy scientist or minor component of a side-mission. In Love and Thunder, she’ll be wielding Mjolnir as the Mighty Thor - a hero who debuted in Marvel comic books in 2014.

When news broke that Portman was rejoining the Thor cast at San Diego Comic-Con in 2019, the Internet collectively lost its mind. "It was definitely nerve-racking [but] it’s really exciting," Portman said during an appearance on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon.

Despite the massive weight of fan expectations, Portman is still amazed at the opportunity she has to appear in some of the most popular movies on the planet.

“It’s always amazing to see yourself, even if only for a split second, in a Marvel film,” Portman recently told Variety Magazine.

Portman’s kids are loving her on-screen promotion, too. “My 5-year-old and my 10-year-old were so enthralled by this process, getting to visit the set and see me dressed up in a cape,” she said. “It made it really cool.”

In an interview with D23 Magazine, Portman alluded to some fun scenes she got to film with Chris Hemsworth for the upcoming movie, saying they got to “imagine the parts of [Jane and Thor’s] relationship we hadn't seen.” She added, “It was some of the funniest stuff in the film.”

Love and Thunder director Taika Waititi, who also directed Thor: Ragnarok, is excited to give audiences a different take on Foster for the new flick. “I’ve seen her play the scientist character in Thor 1 and 2, and it just seemed pointless to do it again,” Waititi told Variety.

Portman had heard fans mention that Jane became the Mighty Thor in the comics but wasn’t sure if that’s where the MCU was headed. One conversation with Waititi made that possibility a reality. “I feel so lucky and feel so excited that that has become part of the story arc for Jane,” she said in a red carpet interview with Variety.

Fans won’t have to wait much longer to see how this character transformation will alter the fate of some of their favorite superheroes. Thor: Love and Thunder hits theaters across America on July 8.

What did it cost?: Beating Marvel's Avengers

I first played Square Enix's "Marvel's Avengers" video game during the Playstation 4 beta test in August 2020. I blogged about it here. Nearly two years later, I reached 100% trophy completion on the game.

To quote the movie "Avengers: Endgame," did I do it? Yes. What did it cost?

A solid start

As I mentioned in my post back in 2020, I enjoyed playing the beta. I thought the game had a lot of potential. When the game officially released, I picked it up immediately. I burned through the short campaign and had a good time. The story was interesting, the gameplay was fun and, once I came to grips with the voices and likenesses of the characters being different than their counterparts in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, I really enjoyed having a new spin on the superheroes we've come to know and love over the past decade and a half.

I particularly grew fond of Ms. Marvel - a character that I had, essentially, no prior knowledge of before getting my hands on this game. She was spunky, she was funny and, more than anything, I resonated with her because she was an Avengers fan. The familiarity I gained from the video game has helped me enjoy the new Disney+ series, "Ms. Marvel," which I think has been great, through three episodes.

The best-laid plans

I think that, with "Marvel's Avengers," the developers' plan was the give players a quick, single-player story mode, then focus on what they wanted to be the "meat and potatoes" of the game: the post-campaign, online multiplayer. Although I'm not a huge proponent of online multiplayer (who am I kidding? I actively try to avoid having to play with or against other gamers online), I can see how they thought this would be desirable. "Team up with your friends as the Avengers!" On paper, sounds super fun. Cash in on Marvel Mania and all that.

But there were a couple problems.

First of all (and this isn't their fault), I have very few friends. Very few friends that 1) have Playstations, 2) bought "Marvel's Avengers" and 3) want to play online with me. So that was a problem. I played online with another person two times, I think, and both times, I had to drive over to my brother's house, tie him down to a chair, duct-tape the controller to his hands, then drive all the way back home, get online and pray that he didn't turn off his console in the meantime. It was literally like pulling teeth. Long story short, I played this game alone 99.7% of the time, so the "online multiplayer" aspect did absolutely nothing for me. I'm sure it would have made things easier, ultimately, but that just wasn't the case for me.

Secondly, the post-campaign content was very repetitive, to say the least. "Avengers" provides a handful of mission types, along with a handful of locations in which to play them. However, if you're playing multiple missions in one sitting, they really start blurring together and, basically, all end up feeling the same. Get to the waypoint. Beat up a wave of bad guys. Open a treasure chest. Get some gear that, more often than not, is worse than the gear currently equipped to your hero. Go to the next waypoint. Rinse and repeat, over and over. It got to the point where I could basically put my fingers on autopilot and knock out pretty much anything the game threw at me.

One good thing was that you could level up your characters pretty quickly. You could sometimes gain two to three levels per mission, which was nice. Progression was fast. That is, until the developers pushed a software update that made it significantly more time-consuming to gain experience points. Why on earth they'd do that and how on earth that made sense is beyond me. At that point, in March 2021, the game was infamously losing players - people were sick of the repetitive nature of the missions and just stopped playing - so what did they do? Ah, yes. They made it harder on everybody else who was still coming back.

That bothered me a little bit, but I made sure to max out all of my heroes before the patch went live, so it didn't affect me as much as it may have others. What did bother me, though, was that, on top of slowing down the flow of experience points, they then added microtransactions (in-game purchases, for real money) that allowed players to buy XP boosts. They literally made the game harder and expected players to pay to get the game back the way it was. That is just straight up moronic. They knew the game's popularity was struggling and they intentionally made choices that resulted in people wanting to play it even less. What the heck?

Once this started happening, I took a break from playing. I didn't touch it or even think about booting it up for months. I never completely uninstalled it, but I wasn't going to give it much attention if they were, basically, going to make it "pay-to-win." No, thanks.

The content roadmap

Initially, I think Square Enix probably thought, "People love Marvel, we make a Marvel game, people love our Marvel game." Seems like a solid formula. They promised, very early on, that they would release additional content for the game as time went on - most notably, new playable heroes. At the time of writing, they have come through on that promise, with post-launch characters Hawkeye, Kate Bishop, Black Panther and (exclusively on Playstation) Spider-man, with Jane Foster's "Mighty Thor" character slated for release coinciding with the MCU's "Thor: Love and Thunder," which hits theaters next week.

Overall, I've felt like the storylines accompanying these new characters have been fun - particularly, Black Panther, who introduced the Wakanda region to the game, which was truly a breath of fresh air, compared to grinding out missions on the Eastern Seaboard, Utah's Badlands and the other couple original locations.

I see a lot of headlines about what's to come, further down the line, for "Marvel's Avengers," but I have a hard time taking those rumors seriously, considering that this game has, for all intents and purposes, been a massive flop, but hey, if they release a character that I'm interested in, there's a chance I'll pick the game back up and play. (Note: I do not care about Jane Foster, even in the slightest.)

In fact, I just Googled "Marvel's Avengers Roadmap" and I'm seeing some reports that Square Enix's long-term plans for additional content in the future have been scrapped altogether. Nice.

The pains of being a completionist

As I've lamented in previous blogs, I've developed into a bit of a Playstation trophy hunter, largely thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic. We've all been at home more than usual these past few years, so why not beat a bunch of my old video games, right?

Without getting too crazy about it, I landed at an uncommonly high completion percentage for "Avengers." I've got a buddy that is a hardcore trophy hunter - like, doesn't settle for less than 100% on most games - but he will never touch this game. Has no interest in it, as far as I know. But I knew if I was crazy enough to get 100% on "Avengers," he'd be proud of me. I only had a couple trophies left. I knew it wouldn't be easy, and it wouldn't be quick, but my buddy Chris would be proud of me if I did it.

Here were the main trophies that gave me trouble:

• Treasure Trove - Open 50 Cache strongboxes
• To the Dark and Back Again - Complete 50 Hive missions
• Holding It Down - Complete 30 War Zones at Challenge III or higher

I went for the "Treasure Trove" trophy first. This consisted of me repeating Vault missions over and over. A "Vault" is a mission where you have to locate an underground bunker and fight off waves of enemies, while periodically running around and fending off computers located around the building. They're not exceptionally difficult but usually took about 15-20 minutes each. At the end of each mission, I would get two or three "cache" treasure chests, and I needed a total of 50 of them. The hardest part about that - and the other quantity-related achievements - is that there is no way of tracking how many you already have, so I was just blindly doing these missions over and over, hoping that I was somewhere in the 40s. Eventually, after several nights of defending vaults for S.H.I.E.L.D., the trophy popped. On to the War Zones trophy.

"Holding It Down" wasn't terrible for a couple reasons: I manually tallied how many I had done, so I knew how many I had left, and I found a mission that I could beat in about five minutes. That's about all there was to it. Just repeated that mission until I hit 30 on my tracker. Boom.

"To the Dark and Back Again" was, truly, the bane of my existence. To get the trophy and hit 100% completion, I had to beat 50 "Hive" missions, which each consist of at least five floors of missions. That's like 250 regular missions. Again, like so many other aspects of this game, it wasn't hard. But it took FOREVER. I wanted to keep a count of how many Hives I had completed but knew I'd done a few in the past, so I didn't know where my tallies actually started. I gave myself credit for having four under the belt and started keeping track from there, but I figured that my count might be five or 10 low. At first, each Hive mission was taking me between 30-45 minutes to beat. The problem was that, in order to get to the "mission" on each of the five or six floors of the building, you had to fight your way through a long hallway. At that pace, it was going to take me 25 hours to get the final trophy. However - and take note, if you ever plan on going through this utter insanity yourself - I discovered that if I used a hero that could fly (Iron Man or Thor), I could just fly over the enemies in the halls and go straight to the door that would get me to the main mission on each floor. Let me tell you this: my Thor got really, really powerful.

Using this new strategy, I found that I could beat a Hive mission in about 18 minutes, barring any unusual delays. Thankfully, this shaved hours off of the time I originally thought it was going to take me to complete this task, but it still ended up being approximately 12 hours of literally running the same Badlands mission over... and over... and over... and over... and over... and over again. Twelve hours of it!

The biggest problem that I found about using my Thor for this task is that he was already at the maximum power level, so the rewards for completing the mission were not useful to me at all. If I would have been using a lower-powered character, at least I could have possibly gotten more powerful gear, but, with Thor, anything I got in exchange for the work I put in was recycled immediately. It hurt my soul.

For those that are curious (probably everyone who is still reading this blog), my tally was four off of what I gave myself credit for, so I surprisingly got the trophy - and the elusive "platinum" trophy for 100% completion - as I notched my 46th tally on the index card.

The epic journey concludes

My wife once sent me a meme of Thanos resting after curb-stomping the Avengers in "Infinity War." The meme said something like, "Me, enjoying the final minutes of a game I love before I immediately uninstall it and never playing it again."

That was me, for like five seconds after getting that last trophy on the eve of June 16, 2022. I enjoyed the feeling of triumph for about 30 seconds, then quit the game and powered down the console. I haven't touched "Marvel's Avengers" since. I've never say never, but I can tell you this: if I ever play that game again, I'm so happy that I don't have to play it the way that the developers want me to play it. Whoever thought that "Complete 50 Hive Missions" was even remotely comparable to "Complete 30 War Zones" is out of their mind. If anything, it should have been, like, 10 Hive missions and 50 War Zones. That would have been way more reasonable. Anyway, it will be such a relief to just play "Avengers" for fun in the future, with which ever character I want and doing whatever missions I feel like doing - absolutely not the mind-numbing grind I just put myself through.

At least I can look at this any time I want:

Ooh. Ahh.

Am I glad I did it? Uh, I mean, according to the numbers calculated by PSNProfiles.com, I think I'm part of about 8% of people who use that website to track their gaming stats that have gotten the platinum trophy (and, apparently, one of the 1.10% of total Playstation users), so that's cool, but willingly subjecting myself to that dastardly, monotonous death march was probably not worth it, in the end. As the classic saying goes, "You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain."

I kid you not, finishing off those Hive missions was four or five nights of extreme boredom. I tried to get in as much gaming late those nights as I could because, the more I played when my wife and son were asleep, the less I'd have to play when they were awake. I joked with a coworker that this accomplishment would be something I could tell my grandkids about, but I don't want them to be ashamed of me.

I snapped this in-game picture of one of Thor's finishing moves as an accurate depiction of how I felt when I finished. "Marvel's Avengers" had me down for the three-count:

I'm sure this post has just been a ringing endorsement for the game, hasn't it? Let me say this: I mostly enjoyed the game. It certainly wasn't all bad. The main thing is that I think the repetitive nature really wears on you after a while, so it's really best in small doses, here and there. It should not be played - and I absolutely do not recommend that anyone play it - the way that I did. It was pain. Such terrible pain.

But hey, my squad ended up looking pretty sick, when all was said and done, so you've got to appreciate that.

What is your most regrettable video gaming achievement? Let us know in the comments section, on Twitter (here and here) or on Facebook.

Farewell.

Playstation Wrap-Up 2021 - FINALLY

Getting my "Playstation Wrap-Up" report was a real pain, for 2021. Some weird error on Playstation's website made it literally impossible for me to even see my stats for days, once they finally released the information to curious gamers. So that was frustrating. Then, when I finally got my numbers to show up, I just had a lot of other stuff going on. I went on a big vacation and was busy with a few other personal projects and hobbies, so here we are, two months later, and I finally have time to blog about it.

With no further ado, let's just jump right in and see how much gaming I did last year.

Total Hours:

Playstation says I played 1,203 hours in 2021. That's about 200 hours less than 2020, but 2020 was a really weird year where nobody really went outside, so cut me some slack.

As I've pondered previously, I'm not sure how accurate that is, and I think the math backs me up. Hear me out: Playstation also reports that I played on 355 days last year (11 more than in 2020). I divided that out, and it comes to a little less than 3 1/2 hours per day, every day last year but 10. That's a lot of playing, if that's true, and I can absolutely guarantee you that I didn't play video games for 3 1/2 hours nearly every day of 2021.

I think, rather, as I have speculated in the past, that this report may actually be pulling the number of hours that my Playstation was powered on, which would make more sense because (until recently) I have used my console to watch all of my movies and for all of my streaming services. Working from home, I know I have watched a ton of movies and TV (I mean, did you see my list of basically everything I watched for two years??).

Also, if a game is on but paused, does that count as "playing"? Probably, right? But what if I have a game on and I pause it to go eat food for half an hour? These are the things I think about because I'm weird.

This would throw into question the breakdown of time I spent playing PS4 titles vs PS5 titles, which is a fun statistic, but... I guess I'm just confused on what's actually being counted here. I don't know.

Anyway, Sony thinks I played a ton of video games last year, which is not entirely incorrect, just not entirely accurate, either. Also, I hardly played any of those hours "online" because I don't like being "pwned" by youths.

Games Played:

So, it appears that I played 38 unique games last year. Sounds reasonable. That, interestingly, is down 21 games from 2020, which is wild.

Retaining the top spot, as no surprise at all, is the newest installment of the "MLB The Show" franchise - and there's a good reason why I played so much of it this year: they paid me to do so. Yes, it's true. I was part of a paid research project that compensated me for playing "MLB The Show 21" a certain number of hours per week. Then, I'd have to answer a few questions about how I played and what I liked. It was a lot of fun, and I figured that if I was going to be playing the game anyway, they might as well pay me for it.

Up a spot from last year is the "NBA 2K" franchise, which is basically cut-and-paste, year after year, but the Jazz were playing really well and I needed my virtual basketball fix.

Speaking of "cut-and-paste," "Marvel's Avengers" debuts at number three this year. I spent 75 hours grinding out slightly different variations of the exact same missions, over and over and over and over again. Gamers and critics alike have maligned "Avengers" for its repetitive quests, but I put in a lot of hours before I realized how "Pay To Win" and dependent on its blind loot boxes it was becoming. I don't play it a lot anymore - I haven't played it at all since they brought Spiderman in as a DLC character - but I suspect that I'll go back to it at some point to clean up the trophies and try for that elusive "100%" completion rate.

"Watch Dogs: Legion" - number four last year - was a game I crushed during the second half of my paternity leave. Let's just say, that's a game that I probably couldn't have played if it wasn't for paternity leave and a sleepy child. Hoo boy, that dialogue was spicy. Awesome game, though. Sixty-one hours of walking around and randomly recruiting anybody I wanted to join my resistance movement. I was furious when my original team member died by, like, falling off a balcony or something. When they say "YOLO," they mean it.

The surprise of the year is the "Final Fantasy VII" remake, which I snagged as a free Playstation Plus game and, apparently, and into which clocked 57 hours. That was a very long game, I'll tell you what. Sheesh. Very long and a bit hard to master, but it ended up being all right. Little did I know that it was going to end of a cliffhanger. Does that mean I'm actually going to have to play the sequel?

Here are a few other games that I spent a lot of time playing last year:

• Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1+2
• Need For Speed Payback
• Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart
• Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy
• Riders Republic
• Kingdom Hearts: Melody of Memory
• Planet Coaster
• Hot Wheels Unleashed
• Sackboy: A Big Adventure

Trophies Earned:

Playstation says I earned 1,091 trophies last year and you know what? They're dang right, I did! Sadly, that's down from 1,410 trophies in 2020, but hey, that's still a ton, ok?

There are two major factors that affect the number of trophies I earn when playing games:

1. Having a co-worker that is a major "trophy hunter"
2. Marrying a wife with completionist tendencies

Basically, I'm held to a high standard, when it comes to completion percentages. My wife and I pride ourselves on being a "three-star family," a phrase we picked up from a friend while playing "Overcooked" on the Nintendo Switch. Basically, it's all or nothing. We aim for 100% and, whenever possible, we get it.

Here are the 14 games that I beat to 100% completion for a glorious Platinum trophy:

• Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales
• God of War
• Madden NFL 21
• Watch Dogs: Legion
• Ether One
• MLB The Show 21
• Far Cry 4
• Ratchet & Clank
• Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart
• Hidden Agenda
• Overcooked: All You Can Eat
• Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy
• LEGO Dimensions
• Kingdom Hearts: Melody of Memory

That's a weird list. A couple of those games were purely just me going back to clean up some percentages on games that I thought I could finish. "Ether One," in particular, is a game I regret going back to. I probably played it one time, years ago, when it was free, but once I booted it back up, I just had to keep going. "Hidden Agenda" was another weird one that required me to play with multiple controllers, phones and tablets to complete. Why am I the way that I am? Who truly knows?

Some of those games were a lot of fun, though. The "Ratchet & Clank" games were both a blast. I'd never played that series before, and I remember thinking they were some of the most fun I'd had with games in a while. Just really unique, fun storytelling, and a great time to play. "LEGO Dimensions" was one of the dreaded toys-to-life games that I fell in love with a few years back (and spent way too much money on). It hasn't aged very well, and there are much better LEGO games that don't require me to get out a bunch of little figures to play every time, so I wrapped that one up and traded the disc back in to GameStop for like $1.25. I'll keep the little minifigs, of course. Can't be parting with those beauties.

I'm very proud of myself for completing a "Madden" game for the first time. Sports games are notoriously tough to "platinum," so a hearty pat on the back for me there.

"Melody of Memory" is a rhythm-based "Kingdom Hearts" game that I wasn't sure I'd ever pick up, but once I did (and realized that I actually liked it more than anticipated), I knew what had to be done. I spent hours and hours grinding out the achievements until I finally got the hang of it enough to beat some of the most difficult levels on the most difficulties. For instance, behold my perfect, nearly immaculate run of one of the trickiest songs in the game, which I recorded for posterity:

Yes, that's really me playing. I still can't believe I pulled that off. Ugh, what PTSD I just had while re-watching that clip.

Analysis and Conclusion:

Playstation didn't give quite as detailed of a breakdown for 2021 as they did in 2020, which is disappointing, so I don't have any other pointless numbers to crunch or tedious stats to mull over, but it was a nice little stroll down memory lane.

Video games have provided a really good amount of entertainment and leisure for me during the pandemic. Thankfully, life is a bit more "normal" now than it was a year ago, but having a kid has also resulted in me staying home more frequently than I did, years ago. It's nice to have something to help me pass the time indoors, and I'm grateful for websites and companies that keep track of all these ultimately meaningless things that I do when I have time for them.

One of the best things about the games I played in 2021 is that I was able to play a lot of them with my wife. In fact, she has even earned a couple platinum trophies, herself! Some of the most fun we had last year was beating the "Overcooked" collection together and, although it won't reflect in the report until next year, there were a couple other games we beat cooperatively, too. What a good sport. What a cool wife.

I don't want to put any pressure on myself but we're now three months into 2022 and I just hit my sixth platinum trophy of the year, so I'm on pace for a record-setting review when the new year rolls around. I guess we'll see what happens.

*****

What games have you been enjoying lately? We'd love to chat about them. Hit us up in the comments, follow us on Twitter (here and here), find us on Facebook or, heck, why not add us on Playstation and join us on our quest for greatness?

Until next time.

MCU Power Rankings - January 2022

It has been two and a half years since the last time we ranked the movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. A lot has changed since then. Four new movies have been released since the summer of 2019, including Black Widow, which was officially delayed three times due to the pandemic. When we ranked the MCU 30 months ago, Avengers: Endgame had just come out and Disney+ wasn't even a thing yet. Needless to say, it's been a while. Once the largely maligned Eternals hit streaming services, we figured it was a good time to poll the people and develop new power rankings for the 27 movies and five TV shows in the ever-expanding galaxy of Marvel Comics.

Before we get into the fun stuff, we need to explain a few things. If you'll allow us...

How were the movie rankings determined?

In the past, we've used a website to help determine numbered rankings - that is, we used a system where people would rank things in order, from best to worst (e.g., favorite movie, second favorite movie, third favorite movie, etc.). We discovered that that has now become a "paid" feature, and we're cheap, so we couldn't use that anymore. This time around, we used Google Forms, and asked those who took the survey to rate the movies on a scale from 1-10, with an "N/A" column for movies that they have not seen. (The "N/A" column awarded zero points per vote.)

Once we closed the poll, we added up the scores for all of the movies, then ranked them in order of total points, from high to low, with the movie getting the most points as the top-ranked movie on the list, the movie with the least points in last place, and so forth.

Tie-breakers for the three instances where two movies received the same amount of points were determined by examining the number of 8-, 9- and 10-point votes those pairs of movies received. The movie that received the most "high" votes won the tie-breaker. For instance, if a movie with three 8-point votes and one 9-point vote tied with a movie that had one 8-point vote, two 9-point votes and a 10-point vote, the second movie would have won the tie-breaker.

How were the TV show rankings determined?

We used a golf-style scoring system to rank the five Disney+ TV shows, meaning that we asked those who took the survey to rank the shows from best (1) to worst (5) - with a 6-point "N/A" option for shows they haven't watched - then calculated the scores. The show with the lowest point total became the top-rated show and the program with the most points became the lowest-ranked on the list.

Did any problems arise during this process, and were any adjustments made to the scoring?

One big problem with this new method of voting (as opposed to literally ranking the movies) is that someone who really loves Marvel could hypothetically go in and just give everything a 10 without having to explain themselves or justify their scoring. We saw that quite a few people who took the survey gave out lots of 8s and 9s, and a good number of people didn't rate anything lower than a 5 or 6. We believe that taking an average of all of the points helped balance out people who consistently voted high or people who gave responses that didn't make much sense (like irrationally disliking a movie that was otherwise scored highly by others, or vice versa). However, we would have preferred to use the other ranking system that would have, for example, made people assign a rank to the four movies to which they gave 9s.

We had to manually adjust several scores for Eternals, in particular. Two people admitted that they gave Eternals a score, despite not actually having seen the movie. One responder rated it as an "N/A" when they took the survey, then watched it a few days later and provided an updated score. So once we tallied the votes, we zeroed-out the scores that shouldn't have counted and added the points for the updated ranking in question.

We deleted two surveys that had results we determined were intentionally trying to negatively skew the results. We haven't put up with trolls in the past, and we kept it that way.

How will this data be displayed?

First, we'll reveal the results of our survey, which we feel is pretty good but certainly not without flaws, which we will break down below the chart. There were three tie-breakers, as explained earlier in this blog, and the winners of those ties are denoted with a + symbol.

Second, because we previously power-ranked the MCU films back in 2019, we created our own "Signs of the Times" rankings, which we will compare with the list we made three years ago. We added a column to that chart to show how our rankings have changed over the past two and a half years.

Following that, we'll unveil the survey results for our Disney+ rankings. Because this is the first time we've ranked the TV shows, those rankings will not be compared to any other lists; it will simply show how the survey votes ended up.

Finally, we also asked people who took our survey to tell us which Marvel movie they'd want to re-watch most, as well as which movie they'd be fine never watching again. Those results will be displayed as percentages.

With no further ado, here's how everything shook out:

MCU Power Rankings - survey results, January 2022

Analysis: After looking over this list, we notice some major flaws in these rankings - namely, that there were a lot of people who took the survey that hadn't seen recent MCU entries like Black Widow, Spider-Man: No Way Home and Eternals. It's practically egregious that No Way Home didn't even crack the top five, let alone the top two or three. Eternals received half the points of the movie directly above it (that's really, really sad, by the way). This appears to be a combination of the movie being objectively bad and the fact that lots of people simply haven't watched it yet.

Interestingly, the voters appear to really like Ant-Man and really dislike Captain Marvel.

Signs of the Times MCU Power Rankings - comparison between 2022 and 2019

Biggest positive movers: Doctor Strange, Spider-Man: Homecoming: +2

Biggest negative movers: Spider-Man: Far From Home: -5

Disney+ Power Rankings

Analysis: Despite being the most polarizing program on the Disney+ slate thus far, WandaVision ended up being the best received by our voters. Based on the survey results, we deduced that hardly anyone that took the survey has watched What If...? (which is a shame). Also, it appears that many people either didn't watch The Falcon & The Winter Soldier or started it but didn't finish; it consistently received the lowest non-"N/A" votes of any of the five shows.

If you had to re-watch any Marvel movie right now, which would it be?

Analysis: Is it recency bias or just a great movie? The people have spoken, and they loved Spider-Man: No Way Home.

If you had to choose one Marvel movie to NEVER watch again, which would it be?

Analysis: By and large, it's the usual suspects - but there were also a couple surprises on this list. We demand an explanation!

*****

Final thoughts

First of all, we want to thank everyone who took a couple minutes to fill out our survey. These days, we don't get around to blogging just for the sake of it very much, so any excuse we can find to whip up a nice little post is certainly welcome.

When we first tallied up the results, we felt pretty good about the list. Upon further inspection, however, it became very clear that some movies (No Way Home, particularly) got punished by the "N/A" column, so the final standings weren't quite what we thought they should be. On the other hand, we anticipate some feedback about our SotT rankings (Thor: Ragnarok particularly), too, so let us hear what you think.

In summary, our recommendations would be these:

• If you haven't seen Spider-Man: No Way Home, you should definitely get out and see it.
• If you haven't watched What If...?, summon your strength and get through the first episode (it's probably the worst of the bunch) and give the animation style a chance. It took us a couple episodes to get used to it, but it looks like some of this stuff will end up being pretty important for Doctor Strange 2.
• If you haven't seen Eternals yet... take your time. Literally, find anything else to watch. We live-tweeted it and had a blast because there was so much to make fun of. It's a big, giant mess and there's only one character that is even somewhat likable. By MCU standards, it is really not very good.
• If you haven't watched Black Widow, let's be honest - they made that movie about five years too late, but they do introduce one really fun character that may or may not pop up in an important role in one of the Disney+ series.
• If you couldn't make it through The Falcon & The Winter Soldier, we would be glad to give you the Cliff Notes version. You know how to find us.

So there you have it! A gigantic, nerdy blog about all the stuff we've spent the last 14 years of our lives watching. Please, please, please let us know what you think about our final rankings by leaving a comment on this post, following us on Twitter (here and here) or hitting us up on Facebook.

Until next time.

Playstation Wrap-up 2020

At long last, Playstation has released personalized statistics for the year on 2020. (See yours here, through March 2, 2021!) They had done so at the end of 2019, so I was curious as to whether they'd do it again. After a month of wondering, my prayers were answered this morning.

Listen, 2020 featured a global pandemic, my shifting to working from home, as well as six weeks of paternity leave, so I was stuck at home most of the year and I spent quite a bit of time playing video games. I would be ashamed, but hey - I was stuck at home like the rest of you. It's not like I could go outside and do anything. Being the stat freak that I am, I love crap like this. No regrets.

More than anything else, I'm just blogging about this so I have the information in writing somewhere where it's not going to expire. Join me, if you will, for a look back on my year in gaming.

Games Played:

One of the first games I played in 2020 was the remastered PS4 version of "Ghostbusters: The Video Game." That, coincidentally was one of the first games I ever played on the Playstation 3, years ago. Over the past year, I played a wide array of games, from sports games to third-person, all the way to farming and city-building simulators, there was certainly a lot of variety in my entertainment. Playstation officially reports that I played 59 different games last year, but here are 20 of my favorites:

• Stardew Valley (PS4)
• Far Cry Primal (PS4)
• Mass Effect 3 (PS3)
• LEGO Marvel Super Heroes 2 (PS4)
• Kingdom Hearts Dream Drop Distance (PS4 remaster)
• NBA 2K20 (PS4)
• Kingdom Hearts III (PS4)
• MLB The Show 20 (PS4)
• Back to the Future: The Game (PS4)
• Mass Effect: Andromeda (PS4)
• Cities: Skylines (PS4)
• The Outer Worlds (PS4)
• Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1+2 (PS4 remaster)
• Marvel's Avengers (PS4)
• Red Dead Redemption 2 (PS4)
• Fallout 3 (PS3)
• Star Wars: Squadrons (PS4)
• Astro's Playroom (PS5)
• Marvel's Spider-man: Miles Morales (PS5)
• Planet Coaster (PS5)

Top Games:

Unsurprisingly, MLB The Show 20 topped my list of most frequently played games, just like MLB The Show 19 did the year prior. I have a tendency to put a ton of time into my baseball games, and 2020 was no different.

2020 was also the year where I went through on the promise I made to play through the entire Kingdom Hearts franchise, as I've blogged about several times in the past (you can find all of my previous posts on that subject by clicking here). It comes as no surprise, then, that "Kingdom Hearts - HD 1.5+2.5 Remix" is listed as my second most-played game; I believe that disc had like three games on it, so it spent plenty of time nestled into my PS4 disc drive.

NBA 2K20 rounds out my top three, which is not totally unexpected, as the game's "daily check-in" feature kept me coming back most days for free login rewards - plus, I played the game a ton during NBA season to get my Utah Jazz fix.

Other games that clocked a ton of hours but didn't crack Playstation's "Wrap-up" list likely would have included the following:

• Stardew Valley
• LEGO Marvel Super Heroes 2
• Kingdom Hearts III
• Assassin's Creed Syndicate (PS4)
• Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1+2
• Batman: Arkham City (PS4 remaster)
• Red Dead Redemption 2

Total Hours Played:

Wow. 2,419 hours... That's, um, like 100 days of having the Playstation systems booted up. I'll justify it by saying this: Playstation likely logged just that - the number of hours that I had a game running, not the actual amount of time I was physically playing. That means that if I paused a game to eat dinner or turned off the TV to run to the store without logging out of the game, the clock kept ticking.

As far as the number of days played, I can chalk that one up to the aforementioned daily check-ins on NBA 2K. Often times, I would hop on for literally like two minutes to get my login reward, then power the system back down, so I find this stat to be somewhat misleading.

Regardless, if that's the quantity of time I'm spending with my consoles, I'm getting a pretty good return on investment. Thanks, quarantine!

Games like Red Dead Redemption 2, Uncharted 2: Among Thieves (PS4 remaster), Far Cry 3: Classic Edition (PS4) and The Outer Worlds would have been games in the "Action-Adventure" genre, so I spent my fair share of hours shooting 'em up and slashing 'em down, as it were. That's a lot of hours.

Total Trophies:

"Trophies" are in-game achievements and goals, such as "Defeat [X Number] of Enemies," "Beat the Game on Hard Difficulty," "Hit a Home Run with a Player from Each Side of the Plate in the Same Game," and so on and so forth. To say that, in the past several years, I've become more focused on what gamers call "trophy hunting" would be accurate.

Platinum trophies are an indicator that one has completed all the goals for a given game - 100% completion, so to speak. Here are the 15 games for which I obtained the elusive platinum trophy during 2020:

• Star Wars - Jedi: Fallen Order (PS4)
• Far Cry Primal
• The Sims 4 (PS4)
• WWE SmackDown vs RAW 2010 (PS3)
• LEGO Marvel Super Heroes 2
• Monster Jam: Battlegrounds (PS3)
• Kingdom Hearts III
• Assassin's Creed Syndicate
• Far Cry 3: Classic Edition
• MLB The Show 20
• WWE 2K20
• Back to the Future: The Game
• Fallout 3
• Need for Speed (PS4)
• Astro's Playroom

In addition, I also got 100% completion on the following games, which did not have an associated platinum trophy:

• Kingdom Hearts 0.2 Birth by Sleep: A Fragmentary Passage
• AdVenture Capitalist

Hooray for me.

Playstation 5:

As if it were a literal Christmas miracle, I beat the odds and somehow, some way was lucky enough to get my hands on a Playstation 5; it was delivered to me on Christmas Eve. Once it was delivered, I got a chance to play it a handful of times in the final week of 2020, so the sample size is quite small. Nevertheless, Sony provided me some insight, as follows:

Editor's note: There is no way that I got 141 PS5 trophies between December 24 - 31. Not a chance. Not sure where that number came from.

Playstation Plus and Online Gaming:

Playstation Plus is a subscription service that not only allows users to play online against other gamers but also provides several free games each month. In 2020, I took advantage of downloading 19 of those games. Thanks for the savings!

I very rarely play games online (cooperatively or competitively) with others because I don't like getting my butt handed to me by children. However, it looks like I spent seven hours playing the highly divisive, online-only Fallout 76, likely with my brother. It didn't happen often, which is a shame. We had pretty high hopes for that game - hopes that were not entirely fulfilled.

Analysis and Conclusion:

After chatting with some, apparently, judgmental co-workers about these stats, one of them ran my numbers and accused me of playing an average of six and a half hours of Playstation per day last year. He told me not to tell my wife. I subsequently pulled out my calculators and verified his math. It is inconceivable that those numbers are accurate. Granted, there are definitely some days when I play multiple hours of video games, but I definitely did not play an average of six hours per day, every single day of the year - not unless the "hours played" is also counting the number of hours my console was running Netflix and Hulu because I totally got my money's worth out of my streaming service subscriptions during the quarantine.

In conclusion, I'm not sure that one stat is completely accurate, but other than that, at least I feel like I'm getting some good entertainment value out of my Playstations. Everybody has a hobby, right? Nobody would judge me if I said that I read 40 books last year. Reading books, watching shows, playing games... It's all pretty much the same thing, right? My family comes first, but I see nothing wrong with having a little digital entertainment on the side. Judge away, haters.

My video gaming in 2020 took me to outer space, through plenty of classic Disney locations, to the Old West, through a re-imagined continuation of my favorite movie trilogy, to sports arenas across the country (even when COVID wouldn't allow me to watch games in real life) and beyond. I played some incredible games that told fantastic stories and spent a few nights playing others that I wish I wouldn't have. All in all, 2020 will probably go down as the year in which I spent more time playing video games in my entire life. I'd never wish another pandemic upon us, but, during the one that we got last year, at least I made a pretty sizeable dent in my ever-growing backlog of games.

*****

What are your gaming memories from 2020? Which games did you enjoy? Which didn't you care for? Which games are you playing (or looking forward to playing) in 2021? I'd love to get your thoughts in the comments section below, on Twitter (here and here) or, as always, on Facebook.

Until next time.

5 Things That Saved Me During Quarantine

It goes without saying that 2020 was a weird, weird year. I, like many others, had a bunch of plans that just didn't work out due to the coronavirus pandemic, like a baseball trip to Chicago and a Santana/Earth, Wind & Fire concert. There were movies I wanted to see, things I wanted to do and a years-long streak of going to the gym that I would have preferred to keep intact. Instead, I found myself quarantined at home, often forbidden by the government from leaving - and when I could leave the house, it wasn't without a very stylish facemask.

However, there were actually a lot of really good things that took place in 2020 that - dare I say it? - wouldn't have happened under normal circumstances. It has warmed my cold, dead heart to see so many friends and acquaintances acknowledging on social media that, although 2020 pretty much sucked, there was also a whole lot to be thankful for. While I feel like I should reserve some of my more personal experiences for a much more private setting, I thought it would be fun to take a second and jot down a few of the fun things that blessed my life while stuck at home in 2020.

1. Video Games

First and foremost, I need to give an enormous shoutout to Animal Crossing, which has truly been a cornerstone in The A-Towns' quarantine experience.

I'll never forget the night of March 11, 2020, when the Utah Jazz vs. Oklahoma City Thunder game was postponed after it was determined that Rudy Gobert tested positive for COVID-19. That was an event that changed the world as we knew it. Professional sports seemed to be the first thing that shut down, but businesses and other public venues were soon to follow. Shortly thereafter, my place of employment sent everybody home and I was stuck inside for the foreseeable future. Thankfully, "Animal Crossing: New Horizons" was released for the Nintendo Switch on March 20, which, I think was, like, my first Friday at home. I hurried over to the nearest Target to pick up the new game and got to work on my island. I was chopping wood and catching fish for days on end, and I loved it. I played the original "Animal Crossing" growing up, so having a new next-gen version of the game was fun. Eventually, my wife, Miranda, took an interest in the game and I set her up with a character in the game.

After that, I didn't see her for three weeks.

Kidding, of course, but she did pick up on the game pretty quickly and, before we knew it, we were tag-teaming the island of Nookton and curating a place for our resident neighbors to enjoy.

By nature, "Animal Crossing" can become a somewhat tedious, chore-driven form of recreation, but with Miranda and me checking into the island and maintaining its upkeep on a nearly daily basis, it gave us something to talk about and something on which we could collaborate and work together. It has also brought us great joy that my sister received "ACNH" for Christmas, and I have had fun hopping online to visit her and give her tips over the past few days. Thanks, "Animal Crossing"!

Editor's note: Two other games we have loved playing together on the Switch were "Stardew Valley" and "FUSER."

*****

I also had plenty of opportunities to catch up on my Playstation backlog over the past nine months. I'm a man who enjoys great deals, and I'm also a long-time subscriber to the "Playstation Plus" program, which grants free games to users each month, so I've accumulated quite a wealth of video games over the years. The inability to go outdoors for entertainment left me at home with nothing but time on my hands, so I tried my best to make sure I got my money's worth out of all the Playstation games that have been sitting around, gathering dust.

Some of the games I enjoyed the most during quarantine were the "Kingdom Hearts" franchise, the freshly remastered "Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1 + 2," "The Outer Worlds," "MLB The Show 20," "Marvel's Avengers" and "Red Dead Redemption 2," which I FINALLY had time to go back and play.

Being the OCD, completionist freak that I am, I also made an effort to fully complete as many games as I could. During the pandemic, I got the ever-elusive platinum trophy (or 100% completion) on the following Playstation games:

• "LEGO Marvel Super Heroes 2"
• "Monster Jam: Battlegrounds"
• "Kingdom Hearts 0.2 Birth By Sleep: A Fragmentary Passage"
• "Kingdom Hearts III"
• "Assassin's Creed Syndicate"
• "Far Cry 3: Classic Edition"
• "AdVenture Capitalist"
• "MLB The Show 20"
• "WWE 2K20"
• "Back to the Future: The Game"
• "Batman: Arkham City"
• "Fallout 3"
• "Need For Speed"
• "Astro's Playroom"

So yeah, video games kept me pretty busy, and I don't regret it at all. It's not like I could have gone outside to do something else instead. Oh, and despite all the crap I said about the PS5 launch (it was a disaster), Walmart and FedEx made me a very happy little nerd by delivering one to me on Christmas Eve, which was a modern day Christmas miracle, so I really can't complain too much.

2. DDP Yoga

Before COVID closed the country down, I had been going to the gym at least once a week for like 10 years. That's not an exaggeration; it's true. I know you probably couldn't tell by looking at me, but I tried my best to stay in shape. However, once gyms closed, I couldn't get out and pump iron anymore, which was a major bummer for me. I tried to cheat the system by jokingly driving to the gym, getting out, doing a couple push-ups and then checking in on the Swarm app, which I use to monitor how often I get out of the house, but Swarm eventually stopped counting "check-in streaks," despite my best efforts, so I stopped going altogether.

During the pandemic months, I have only gone back to the gym one time since they re-opened with safety precautions (allegedly) in place. Beside myself, I only saw one other patron (excluding employees) who was wearing a mask, so I guess I haven't felt totally safe to return until this virus is a bit more under control. Muscleheads are weirdos and generally cannot be trusted, in terms of personal hygiene and sanitation.

Without a gym to go to, I've had to get creative with my exercise. More often than not, this has meant that I turn to my old friend Diamond Dallas Page's "DDP Yoga" program for home fitness. Page, a 60-something WWE Hall of Famer, created his home workout regimen to help people lose weight and recover from sports injuries, but Miranda and I have used it as a suitable replacement for our VASA memberships, which we really should call in and put a freeze on before they continue to charge our monthly fees again.

DDP Yoga has helped us stay relatively "in-shape" while quarantined, and has been a nice activity for us a couple times a week after work. Admittedly, we haven't done it quite as well as we probably should have, but we've supplemented with occasional walks around our condominium parking lot and other miscellaneous exercises. Certainly, I'm no yoga expert, but I can absolutely tell an improvement in my balance and flexibility between the time I started working out with DDPY and now, so I'll count that as a win.

3. Streaming Services, Virtual Fan Experiences and Theater Trips

When Miranda and I first got married, I floated out the idea that, at some point, we should have a "movie month," where we watched one movie every night for an entire month. Sounded like fun at the time.

Now, nine months into a global pandemic, that doesn't sound as fun as I thought a year ago. During quarantine, I have literally kept track of everything that I watched. Granted, I didn't think we'd still be essentially locked down for this long, but I thought it would be interesting to see how much stuff I could watch until they sent me back to the office.

Hang on a second. Let me pull up my list.

It's 223 bullet points long, including movies, seasons of TV shows, documentaries and made-for-TV concerts. Two hundred and twenty three. Holy crap.

I've binge-watched a lot of great stuff, including catching up on some old series that I never finished; rewatching some stuff that Miranda had never seen; watching live shows like "The Masked Singer," "Survivor" and even "The Bachelorette." I've seen a handful of movies and shows edited for content, thanks to VidAngel. I've DVRed classic movies that were new to me, like "Saving Private Ryan," "Gladiator" and "Rebel Without a Cause." Like many of you, I thoroughly enjoyed Season 2 of "The Mandalorian" from the comfort of my living room. I'm a far more cultured, in-the-know person now, after spending so much time on the couch, and I most definitely got some great value out of my streaming subscriptions this year.

*****

I was a "virtual fan" a couple times during 2020! You may have seen me during a Utah Jazz playoff game or (briefly) on WWE programming ("Smackdown!" and "205 Live"). You may not have seen me on "The Masked Singer" because they totally botched their virtual fan experience, but hey, we did get to watch the first performance of "Group C" in Season 4. They were not good - clearly the worst of the three groups this season, but I guess it was kind of interesting, nevertheless.

*****

One aspect of entertainment that we can thank COVID-19 for is straight-to-streaming movie releases - something that seemed unfathomable a year ago. During the pandemic, my family and I have been treated to "Bill & Ted Face the Music," "Soul" and "Wonder Woman 1984," and we even forked over $30 to watch the decent-but-mostly-unnecessary "Mulan" remake on Disney+ one time.

One thing I really had fun with during the pandemic was being able to venture out a couple times to a real-life movie theater (it's a big building we used to go to when we wanted to eat popcorn and watch movies with our friends, back before the plague). When things gradually started to open back up, we found a theater about 30 minutes south of where we live that was showing old movies for super-cheap. They were even showing my all-time favorite movies, the "Back to the Future" trilogy, and Miranda mentioned that we should check it out since I'd never seen those movies on the big screen. Over the course of a few weeks, we saw all three movies, socially distanced from the half-dozen other people in the theater, for less than $10, total. It was amazing and definitely a highlight of 2020 for me.

On three other occasions, my family rented out a theater to watch a movie together. That's right - just me, my parents and my siblings' families, all alone to watch "How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World," "Ghostbusters" and "Hocus Pocus." The theaters took all the necessary precautions and treated us like VIPs the entire time. I can't thank the Megaplex and Cinemark theaters that gave us that thrice-in-a-lifetime experience. Again, that was something that we probably never would have done without the pandemic paving the way.

4. #GiveThanks

Arguably, my favorite week this year other than Christmas was the week leading up to Thanksgiving. When President Russell M. Nelson of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints issued a challenge for members of the church - and those of any other religion or background - to spread gratitude on their social media accounts, my Facebook and Instagram feeds were overcome with fun posts from those I follow. I got to see what made my friends and family happy, which provided a welcome break from the doom and gloom of election season, and helped me catch up with people I hadn't heard from in years. It also gave me a chance to reflect on the things that I was thankful for, from my family to my education and the many opportunities I've been given to work in journalism and with comic conventions. It was always fun to wake up each day and think about what I would be posting before the sun went down, and it made it so I actually looked forward to getting on my phone and mindlessly scrolling through what everyone else was talking about. For those of you who participated in the #GiveThanks challenge, thank you for making my life better during 2020.

5. Parenthood/Working From Home

Finally, I am thankful for parenthood - and no, I'm not talking about the TV show "Parenthood," although we did watch Season 1 a few weeks ago.

The year 2020 will always be one of my favorite years, if for no other reason than that it gave me and Miranda our first child, Stockton. Every day, I am still in awe that we have a little roommate - and that Miranda actually let me name him after my favorite basketball player. Stockton is such a perfect little boy. He is the best little buddy we ever could have asked for, and he has brought us such great happiness and joy. He is cuter and way funnier than we ever could have imagined, and we just love kissing his little cheeks. He is our snuggle bug, our movie and TV pal, and he loves staying up late with Daddy to play video games or read books. Speaking of reading books, we have spent quite a bit of time reading to Stockton lately, whether it has been a book by our old family friend John Cena or a story out of Stockton's brand new Marvel storybook. He is generally a very happy dude, and more than anything, he loves being held - by anyone!

Parenthood has been a wild ride for us so far. We're trying our best to learn what to do to take care of our baby, and I think we're actually doing ok! It has definitely taught me to put the child's needs first, above my own, which means:

• I quite often can no longer play online video games that cannot be paused
• Several times a week, I'm not going to bed until at least 1 AM
• Stockton likes being held by someone who is standing up, to the dismay of my lower back and legs

*****

When Walmart first told us that we were going to have to work from home because of the virus, I honestly thought we'd be out of the office for maybe two weeks, then we'd be right back. Obviously, that didn't happen, and COVID-19 has turned into a much bigger deal than I thought it was. Working from home has been an interesting deal. The work I do can totally be done virtually, so that hasn't been bad, but I do miss the ability to walk up to somebody's face if they haven't responded to my Slack message for 45 minutes and make them give me an answer on the spot. I also miss the free snacks they gave us in the office. Other than that, being away from the office really hasn't been miserable.

Working from home has saved me, undoubtedly, hundreds of dollars on gas. Instead of filling up bi-weekly, now I refuel about once a month. There have been a couple weeks where I haven't even gone outside in days. That kind of sucks, but at least it's an inexpensive lifestyle.

Setting up shop on the couch or in my home office has given me the ability to turn on the TV (mostly as background noise) while I work, without interruption. It's a nice way to multi-task while still hitting my numbers and getting stuff done for my bosses.

The best thing of all is that I've been able to spend so much time with Miranda since March, and with Stockton since October. I got six weeks of paternity leave when he was first born, and they're allowing me six more to use any time within the first year of the child's life. I'll take those in a couple weeks, once Miranda has to go back to work. Right now, they're saying we will continue to work remotely until at least July 5, 2021. Of course, they'll play things by ear and adjust that date, if necessary, but it most likely means that I'll get to play Mr. Mom to Stockton for a few more months (simultaneously saving a ton of money that we would have had to spend on child care in a non-COVID world). My wallet thanks my employer, and Mr. Sam Walton, the veritable founder of the feast. We are incredibly thankful and count ourselves blessed that Miranda and I both were able to continue working throughout all the craziness 2020 threw our way.

No, 2020 was not even close to the year we all wanted. The holidays all fell on weekends, "twenty-twenty" was a nice round number, there were plenty of vision puns to be made, but COVID-19 wrecked us all and forced us into uncomfortable situations where we all had to make adjustments. No, things didn't magically revert back to normal at the stroke of midnight, early this morning. Sometimes, you just can't always get what you want.

But taking a page out of President Nelson's book and looking for the positive memories that were made along the way really goes to show that 2020 will go down as one of the most memorable stretches of our entire lives.

Here's hoping that we can do a bit more traveling, a lot more socializing and maybe even attend a couple sporting events and concerts in 2021.

Happy new year from everybody here at Signs of the Times!