2013-09-22

- Games: [Devil Survivor 2,SMT Strange Journey]

- Anime: [OreShura, Sukunai, Sukunai Next, Robotics Notes, Kokoro Connect, Kotoura-San, Tonari no Kaibutsu-kun,Oreimo S2, Hataraku Maou-sama, Yahari Ore no Seishun, Devil Survivor 2, Valvrave the Liberator,Mirai Nikki, Aku No Hana, Suisei no Gargantia, Neko Stone Cat, Accel World]

- Manga: [Kimi No Iru Machi (caught up with the series), Gantz ]


- Shows: [Walking Dead S1-S3, Mad Men S1-S6, Arrested Dev S4, The Borgias S1-S3, GoT S3, Plebs S1, BBT S6, Community S4 , Dexter Season 1-8]

- Movies: [ 2001 Space Odyssey]

- Books:[Royal Assasin, Assassin's Quest, Timescape, The Forever War]

- Audio Books: [Steve Jobs, Masters of Doom, The Time Machine, A Picture of Dorian Gray, Alexander the Great (Jacob Abbot), History of Julius Caesar (Jacob Abbot), Children of God (MDR)]



2013 - ongoing



- Games: [Guildwars 2, Tales of the Abyss, Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate, Pokemon Platinum]

- Anime:[Attack on Titan, Majestic Prince, Kimi No Iru Machi, Wakamote, Gin No Saji, Inu to Hasami wa Tsukaiyou]

- Anime Catchup: [Hyouka, Black Lagoon, Banner of the Stars]

- Shows:[ Breaking Bad, Homeland]

- Books:[A Step Further out, Crossing the Chasm, Thinking fast and slow, Don Quixote,The Stand (stephen king), Leviathans Wake]

- Audio Books: [Heart of Darkness, William the conqueror (Jacob Abbot)]



Random Ramblings:



Dexter Season 1 to 8:



So I finished watching all of Dexter, there's only 1 more episode left this season and that hasn't even come out yet. Have I got anything to take home from the experience? Not particularly, Dexter's not a hero or an anti-hero, he's just not hero at all. He's a flawed personality that you don't want to borrow any traits of, but is amusing to watch. His awkwardness is quite relatable to.



Accel World:



So .the animation apparently covers the first two light novels. Its written by the same guy who wrote SAO, its not as good imo. Firstly, the elephant in the room, or rather the fat protagonist in the room. The premise that surrounds him is a little bit forced if you ask me. He's a short fat dude with no inner or mental qualities other than modesty going for him. He's a nice guy, and that's about it, he seems to spend a lot of his time playing computer games.



Yet we e have this beautiful and intelligent older woman from the year above him who apparently is in love with him. It's almost like twilight for slobbish nerds, seems to come out of the mastabatory fantasies of an adolescent fat kid. Girls that age just don't behave like that, what's worse is he does nothing about this situation, he's practically a bystander in his own relationship. Yet he's never short of some epic speech about how he's going to fight and protect and stay by her side, when he's inside the game.



One might say that's pretty deep and I'm missing the point. But after you watch it you'll understand. Anyhoo, positives, the female lead is interesting, and pretty cool. But i'm just saying that because I'm male. Negatives, I expected something better from the writer of sword art on-line.



The Forever War:



Finished reading this, I bought the book ages ago. To borrow the words from the writer of the afterword, to its credit the plot is simple, the situations relatable. Not that I'm saying relatability is a quality books (or other forms of entertainment if you're looking at my dexter comment) need to have in order to be good. Most people are inexperienced in the vast majority of the things in the world, so books also allow us to understand things that are not relatable at all.



What I liked most about the plot is the main character, he survives, but its not this tough act he puts up, or by some sort of warped mentality, he just goes with it, makes the best of where he's at and for the most part is pretty mellow about this. All things considered, I think that's partly because he's fucking stuff half the time, he does obtain a permanent love mid way through the book, its not the stuff of shakespeare, but it seems to highlight closeness, familiarity and a general healthy mental and physical interest in the other.



The "Forever War" in which he participates in, is named after it's longevity, troops have to make these relativistic jumps through space at near light speed, so when they come back home, the earth changes. And changes it does in interesting ways. On his first jump back the world is pretty rough, kinda like some sorta back alley planet off a star wars movie, and homosexuality is on the rise. On his second trip back almost everyone is homosexual and he's kind of a pariah for not participating, he refuses to go through "correction". In this era men and women are not born but are quickened in test tubs. On his last trip back, humanity is now a sort of hive man represented by a single man and women. Everyone looks the same.



It ends quite nicely, on his last jump his lover isn't allowed to come with him so she works out a series of smaller jumps to use as a sort of time travel mechanism to catch up with him for when he arrives back. And she's waiting for him on some planet that's a short jump away. The war ends because they realise that the enemies weren't aggressors, just people who misunderstood each other, both races had outgrown war. The writer seems to have a rather positive outlook on the end of war, other writers tend to romanticize the perpetual war machine, but he envisions an an inevitable end to war, which is quite nice actually I've never considered it since I'm from the perp. crowd.



All in all, it was a good read, I don't know what to take from. I quite liked the main character and his relationship to his fellow men and women. Camaraderie? Something I've never been properly able to understand.

Personal:



Trauma levels seem to have spiked a little bit. I treat my psychological state like my physical, I understand that I can't just let it go into ruin, that it needs just as much exercising and taking care of.Lately I'm experiencing more panic, stress and horrible discomfort from past memories. I'm relying on my subconscious to work it out, usually this results in a dream that I don't want to have, including people I don't want to see. But as I understand it, this is my minds healing process, what I cannot obtain physically my mind conjures up in a safer temporal setting, it's a slow drip feed of hurdles to overcome. Self healing, the mind is equally capable of this much the same way the body is, we do not walk around with gaping wounds on our persons, those of us that do don't live very long, if the parallels are striking, its because once again I've come across one of life's "seemingly obvious" rules that one taking a closer look, reveal to us some truth about the world that is impossible to deny.



Sometimes during the day, at work, I will have made an ugly realisation about something, like an anti-ephinany, those are some of my worst moments, I feel immobilised and cornered. Mostly, just depressed.



In other news, it's also the height of the gaming season. Got a whole bunch of new games that I've added to the back log, I'll be churning through them soon.



Common Place Book:



I read an article about keeping a common place book. I like that idea, and a lot of the concepts overlap with the reasons I want to create my notemaker app. It's my highest priority at the moment. There were also other things in his article which were pretty interesting, foremost amongst them was his outlook on books, how to treat them.



Surprisingly his first rule was treat them like shit. This was such an obvious but amazing idea to me. I'm a collector of sorts, I don't want to be, but I am, and one of the things that annoys me the most about collecting, is the upkeep of maintaining everything, keeping things neat and tidy, for the sake of it. In reality the amount of time and energy put into these efforts don't tally up to the intangible benefits received from their physical counterparts. The things that I'm collecting have abundant copies, humanity will not lack for it, and my soul does not grow from nurturing its physical embodiment.



Write on the margins, break the backs, in essence, leave you mark on it, this is how you will remember things from it, and accumulate intangible but valuable essence from the item. It sounds almost animalistic, like some sort of wild beast marking it's territory, but I think that's because the idea is inherently true, that's what makes it so beautiful, because it's so obvious and natural and counter to how we behave, it highlights the strange-ness of the collector mindset.



Another thing I've sort of learned from him was, always be reading, have a book at hand, spend any moment I have to spare to read. This is a great idea when you combine it with maintaining a common place book. This way you're not mindlessly ploughing through books, rather you are trying to digest the best bits of books in a slow, but steady stream. I'd like to try this both with books and games and see where this will take me.



Grinding Guild Wars and Never doing what I save for the weekend or later:



Lastly I have to mention my incurable diseases of late. Lets start with grinding guildwars 2. There's this thing called champion farming, what it entails is a series of boss monsters which a group of around 50 people will repeatedly kill in a sort of circuitfor hours on end. Utterly mundane. I usually do it whilst watching some show that I need to catch up with (Dexter in this case, started on 24 the series as well). You gain in game money, that's about it. I could save myself a lot of time and just spend 8 quid every friday and BUY the money from their in game store. So why am I wasting some much of my TIME on this? I should just stop it. I note it down here so that future me can see past me has come to the resolve to stop it, you better fucking stop it future me!



The second habit is leaving work-work to the weekend and never doing it. I need to NOT do this. I need to set a goal for myself for the day at work, and I need to DO it before the day ends. How I do that, I'll have to build a new process for it, my current process sucks balls.



Reading Books:



I'm not reading enough! looking at my 2013 count there's a shameful amount of books. I need to get into a reading habit again.
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