ATEEZ: Epilogue - Answer

    On January 6th, 2020 Ateez dropped their "Album Treasure Epilogue - Answer". As I watched their MV for their title song "Answer" I kept getting EXO and X-EXO vibes (I'm not saying they are imitating them I'm saying they gave me the same kind of feelings I got from EXO and X-EXO). I'm not surprised because I think that Ateez are going to be as good as EXO one day. Those boys are that good! I bought both the physical albums and the digital one.

Title Song: Answer

    The album has 5 tracks with the title track being "Answer". The songs are: Answer, Horizon, Star 1117, Precious and Outro! Long Journey. I really can't tell you which one is my favorite because I love all of them but Answer has been played the most according to my iPhone. Now let us look at the Physical Albums of which there are two. I'm not sure if they have names I'm just going to call them red and blue.

I'm going to do something different this time, and I'm going to compare them side to side :-) So here is what their boxes look like. Each one has a clearish sleeve that they come in.

    When you open the boxes the first thing you see is the picture book. The only problem I have with the picture books is that the spines break easily. The quality of pictures is amazing though.

    The pictures also reaffirmed my idea that they were giving off vibes of EXO vs. X-EXO but in their own style. The second photo also reminds me of their song "Say My Name" with the whole dark vibe thing going.

    In the photo books there were photo cards and clue cards. The clue cards are a card with jumbled writing that can be relieved by a red film. I have old person eyes so I honestly can't tell you what is written in the clue cards...They've had these in almost all of their Treasure Album series I think.

    In both albums, like in previous albums there are also stickers, which I love using in my journals *smirks*

    Both albums also have medium sized photocards which have the lyrics on the back of each one.

Finally the CDs, which are the point of these albums after all lol.

I hope you have enjoyed this look at the Ateez Albums. I enjoyed showing them off.

Udemy As a Learning Tool

          Udemy advertises itself as "The world’s largest selection of courses". I don't know if that is true but they certainly have a large selection of courses on just about anything you can think of. Originally I wanted to review a specific course but in the end I opted for reviewing the site as a whole.

ABOUT UDEMY:

1. Udemy has over 100,000 online video courses with new additions published every month. 
2. Once you make a purchase, you have life time access to it. A lot of times the information on a course you have already bought is added too or even completely changed and the teachers will send out emails letting everyone of the changes. So you could be done with the course but then the teacher will add another module and an email will be sent to you to let you know. You can then go learn that module too without paying extra since you already bought the original course.
3. A 30 day money back guarantee, so if for some reason you are not satisfied with the course you can get your money back. I had that happen to me once where I bought a course and then I bought a related one which turned out to be the same course but an older version. I got my money back right away and the author was notified to take the older course offline.
4. The categories of courses that they have include: Development, business, IT and software, design, marketing, personal development, photography, and music.  
5. Another thing that I noticed about the site is that they are forever running sales. I used to think that that was interesting until I realized that this was a marketing ploy lol...you know how I learned that? By taking a course on business and marketing from Udemy. The truth is that that is the price range for most of the courses on Udemy, 10 - 20 dollars at the most. For what they teach I think it is good value.

          My experience with the site has been very positive as a whole. I've learned (and still learning) things like business, Korean, Latin, Irish history, Chinese, drawing, watercolor painting, and many other things. 

WHAT I'VE LEARNED:

1. Make sure you always check on how many hours the course is, they could have tons of videos but they only amount to 1-2 hours and that means that the course is not in depth. If you are looking for an introduction then that is fine but if you are like me and want to learn the ins and outs of a subject as much as possible then the longer courses are the best. 
2. Make sure that you look at the outline of the course and watch the previews they offer. This allows you to know a few things:
• like whether this course has what you want to study when it comes to subject matter, 
• whether the teaching style is something you can learn from, 
• and whether you can understand the teacher because sometimes the teacher's first language is not English and the accents can be a hurdle for some people.

I hope that what I shared with you has helped you make up your mind on whether to check out Udemy. In case you do want too here is the link: udemy.com        

EXO news

This should have been up yesterday but I got side tracked so without further ado...here it is!

SUHO:

       I’m going to start with what makes me happy. What makes me happy is that finally SM Entertainment decided to recognize that our leader Suho, EXO’s guardian Kim Junmyeon deserves to be recognized as a solo artist too. I swear, a lot of people have slept on Suho. He is a great singer, a good drama actor and an amazing theater actor. He does it all while being the single mom to 8 crazy kids, three of which he has to keep track of from afar (Lay being in China and D.O. and Xuimin being in the military). He does an amazing job. He is a good mommy. 

       Now let us talk about his new mini album Self Portrait.  As usual, there is minimum promotion from SM but EXO-Ls are doing an amazing job of promoting him...like they do for everything EXO related. So here is what we know for sure about the album. There will be two versions of the album. The album has 6 tracks and Suho was involved in every step of the process. The album will be released on March 30. 

          A teaser was released as well as some portrait paintings of Suho. On March 18, the teasers and images for the album will be released starting with a “mood Sampler”. 

          There is also a rumor that his title song is called Saranghja, which is EXO’s motto that Suho came up with. May I just say we love you too Leadernim!!!!!

Baekhyun: 

          While our boy has been busy with SuperM lately, he didn’t forget to drop the fact that he is in the studio recording music. So a Baekhyun comeback is happening y’all!!

Now I’m going to talk about what really makes me angry...

Chen:

          Seriously, Chen has been going through a lot lately but SM has not being doing much to protect him. There is only so much that we, his fans and real EXO-Ls, can do. We’ve fund raised quite a bit to counter EXOLACECAFE nastiness and we’ve been doing our best to report accounts who bully Chen or spread hate about him. This is actually one of the only times I’m glad he doesn’t have a social media presence beaides his Youtube channel. The stuff that people who call themselves EXO-Ls, spew is disgusting. ALL THE MAN DID WAS FALL IN LOVE for heaven’s sake. Our baby is human after all! 

        Even after EXO members through an SM statement told them that they wanted Chen to stay in the group they still are spewing their hate. They really need to get a life and stop their bullying ways. You don’t own the man! You can read about it here: 

SM statement

As I said the statement has not stopped them. They still continued with their hate by protesting in front of SM, which was a failure, and renting a truck to sit in front of SM with their demand which also failed because the truck was parked illegally. But their latest shenanigan is their most horrifying. They leaked his information on line as well as his parents’ information and they organized advertisements to go up on buses in Chen’s own hometown where his parents can see. Thankfully, the adverts were stopped since they did not comply with city regulations...however, how could anyone have this much hate in their heart for someone who just fell in love??

You may read about the shenanigans here:

EXO-L ACE HAS FINALLY GONE TOO FAR

CHEN’S HOMETOWN SHUTS DOWN EXO-L ACE’ATTEMPT TO EMBARRASS CHEN

  

iKon Comback

          This comeback for iKon was really hard on all iKonics thanks to what happened in 2019. On June 12, 2019, B.I announced his departure from the group on his personal Instagram account after news agency Dispatch unearthed messages from three years prior, outlining his attempt to purchase marijuana and LSD  from an undisclosed female dealer. Dealer is now known to be the same one from the scandal with Big Bang’s T.O.P. On February 6th, 2020 iKon dropped their comeback album. So this comeback is the first one without the iKon leader Kim Hanbin (B.I.). I was not very sure about what I wanted to do since (B.I.) was my ultimate bias in the group but I still wanted to support the boys who worked hard. In the end, I just bought the digital album though now I am thinking I might go and get physical ones too. What changed my mind? I can see B.I.’s fingerprint all over the album and why not since he wrote and composed 4 out of the 5 songs. I loved Oh Yeah (the title song if I am not mistaken) and all the other songs in the album. The fifth song, Flower, was written by DK and Bobby and DK also did the composition with some help. I felt like it was an homage to B.I. 

So let us look at the digital cover. 

I love the way it looks and the color red just works with the title of the album. 

The album has 5 songs as I said, with Flower being the only one not written or composed by B.I. 

I knew without looking that Ah Yeah was written by both Bobby and B.I. because of the energy of the song and how catchy it felt.

So have a listen to it: 

The other song (and only song that B.I. didn’t have a hand in) was Flower and you can listen to it here:

My first thought after knowing the B.I. Had a big hand in making this album was I hope they paid him for it...and to this day I have this thought.

On March 8, 2020, Kim Hanbin released a song through his Soundcloud that just broke my heart. The song seems to be aimed at fans who left and fans who stayed and also his ex-members. I have been listening to it on loop for the last two days. I have to admit, I listened to it more than I listened to iKon’s album...

The song is called DEMO.2 and the lyrics were kindly provided then translated by @big_seunghyun on twitter. 

Here are the lyrics in Korean and in English: 

You can find the song here: 

DEMO.2 by Kim Hanbin

Give it a listen. It is really short at only 1 minute and 5 seconds but it is his voice only and it is...amazing. I can now listen to it without crying but I still tear up none the less.

EXO Kpop Haul

          This post has been a long time coming. It is a mix of a lot of things that I pre-ordered and waited for to come in and then photographed. Life then became a little hectic and I just couldn’t sit down to put words to the pictures I took. But finally, here it is; the EXO kpop haul plus EXO news.

1. EXO Season Greetings

I pre-ordered this when they first opened the door to pre-orders (I’m not going to use dates because I kind of forgot when I pre-ordered stuff and when they came in, yes I’m old 😂)

This is what I saw when I opened the shipping box. I new that face was D.O. Before I read the writing on the sock and now I have a Kyungsoo sock that I love to look at and pet when ever I miss him which is nearly every day.

How cute is that face?! Anyway, now on to the actual season’s greetings. 

This is what the box looks like on the outside. I think it looks better than last year’s box. 

This is what you see when you open the box. A second layer of protection and it is made out of cardboard too. 

I loved what I saw the moment I opened the second layer. There were so many goodies in the box I didn’t know what to start with first so I closed my eyes and grabbed something.

This was what I first grabbed. It is a box of picture cards.

In total there were 24 cards with messages written on the back of each one from the members. I could make out some of the writing and some I couldn’t make out. I’m still learning and Korean handwriting is hard lol. Now let us look at the pretty pictures. There are six sets of four pictures. 

Suho leadernim. 

Byun Baekhyun 

Park Chanyeol, Mr. happy virus.

Kai, but I see a glimpse of Nini Bear in one of the pictures. (In case you are wondering nini bear is the cutesy Kim Jongin while Kai is the sexy Kim Jongin)

Our baby, Oh Sehun. It is so obvious he misses Kyungsoo. The picture on the top left is a typical Kyungsoo style of taking a picture.

Finally, Chen, or Kim Jongdae, or the man who will give me my first grandchild...I’m so excited! 

All the pictures are just so beautiful. I can’t even pick which one is my favorite. So I won’t.

Postcard sized calendar with each postcard being its own month. There are six members this time so we had two sets of pictures to have 12 months. 

Next up is a desk calendar. 

I love that the desk calendar has all their birthdays and all the important anniversaries for EXO and EXO-Ls. 

A booklet with pretty pretty boys in it so I chose my favorite pages of the lot. 

A diary. I’m not fond of the whole week at a glance thing so that part won’t get used much but the rest of it will get a good workout. Plus there are pictures at the beginning of the diary and the middle.

They also included stickers. These are actually better quality than last year’s and I am using them to mark pages in my journal as we speak 😬. 

Finally, we have almost A4 sized photocards of the members. 2 for each one of them. 

2. EXO Comeback

At the end of last year, EXO came back with their 6th Album Obsession. The concept sprouted a few hypotheses online. I felt like the concept was very interesting. For one it wasn’t your typical good vs. evil theme, one group EXO was badass and the other X-EXO is more badass? Or is it the other way around?  Either way, the concept was really interesting and the songs supported the idea well. I love the title song Obsession but I think my absolute favorite has to be Trouble. I especially love the lyrics that say “good feels bad, bad feels good...right feels wrong, wrong feels right...” it just fits. But then that is EXO for you 🔥. 

We didn’t get a winter album or a repackage but we did get thee different album covers and a Kihno album kit. So that makes four. 

As you can see from the picture above there is the EXO Obsession version, X-EXO Obsession version, an Obsession version and an Album kit. 

I’m going to start with the tiny Kihno album kit:

This is the sleeve of the album.

This is the album box. 

Inside it had a tiny booklet with some great pictures. I loved how the upright booklet shows the EXO version of the members but then you have to turn the booklet upside down to see the X-EXO version of the members. 

I got this X-EXO version of Chen photocard. I have to say he looks amazing in it...

And this is the Kihno kit. 

Next up is the Obsession Version:

This is the back and front of the Obsession album. 

The CD sleeve with a pullout photo of the group. 

As you can see one side has EXO and the Other has X-EXO but one is upside down while the other is right-side up. Here it happens to be EXO that is upside down. 

This beautiful postcard-sized photo of X-Kai

And this amazing photocard of Sehun.

The album also came with a poster:

I got Baekhyun.

X-EXO version of the Obsession album: 

The back and front of the album.

CD sleeve and the full member picture.

Look at Suho!

I got this hologram photo of Kāi 

And this photocard of Chen...LOVE!

Each member got a booklet of their own with amazing pictures. Their stylist and the photographers did an amazing job but then they had amazing models to work with...

Here is an example of one of the booklets. 

The album came with a poster also. I got this poster of Kāi.

Finally, the EXO version of the album:

The back and front of the album.

I got the Chanyeol hologram picture.

CD sleeve and full photo of the members.

And another one.

I got this sassy photocard of Chanyeol. 

Like the X-EXO version, each member got their own booklet.

An example of what is inside.

The album came with a poster. I got Kai.

I also have two more posters to show...not sure which albums they came with since they were just loose in the box 😬.

They didn’t photograph well I’m afraid. Chanyeol’s head is not that tiny on his body loool.

3.EXO News

I’m going to start with Chen, whom I’ve already talked about previously here and here.  I have to say the International EXO-Ls have done a great job of protecting Chen. Also, EXO themselves have protected Chen really well, enough that SM has issued a statement saying Chen stays BUT EXO-L ACE CAFE have yet to give up they are not just harassing Chen but also his parents. They are despicable. 

Suho has done a run as the Joker on stage and has a web series out. Soon he will also have a solo debut. I think he is going to the military some time at the end of the year or the beginning of next year. 

Baekhyun is promoting as part of SuperM currently as well as has a song that is part of an OST. 

Chanyeol has his NNG Studio work and he is promoting with Sehun as EXO-SC. 

Lay is off doing a lot of good things. He had a couple of songs out and did some concerts. He is also promoting some brands like Calvin Klein. 

Kai is promoting as part of SuperM currently as well as working on his solo debut.

Xuimin is coming out of the military in December 2020.

D.O. has recently made corporal and will be coming out of the military on January 2021.