It's the last week of school before the six-subjects-spread-over-three-weeks exam weeks. I have so many big assignments! Like, three of them! And I've having slow, burdensome progress on them. Honestly the more I "learn" here, the less I feel like I know anything. The world is too damn big and filled with too many damn people with too much opinions about everything. Literally nothing is true and everything is permitted.
I've also been crap at expressing myself. My writings have been bad and half-hearted. I trust my own opinion less and less. But enough hand-wringing! Have at you!
Games
NieR
NieR is really good. I hesitate to say any more, since, as with most of Yoko Taro's narrative, it's good in how surprising it is. In how unconventional it is. In its own bloody-mindedness in its messaging. I think I've mentioned before how Drakengard is a bad game and it's great exactly because it's a bad game. NieR is a lot more accessible while also having everything that makes Yoko Taro's games unique.
The world of the first NieR holds more life than Automata's abandoned Earth, though obviously with lower visual fidelity. The music is just as fantastic, although with shorter loops and less customised renditions. Best of all, it doesn't try to be a high-detailed open world like the AAA games of, say, Ubisoft, and yet there are still small details that are a delight to find if you pay attention.
And the voice acting! It really makes the game come alive. NieR and it sister game Drakengard 3 probably have the best English voice acting in all the history of games.
Overwatch
I've been playing it again. It is fun. That is all.
Okay. One more thing: the new hero, Wrecking Ball, is the cutest little thing and I love him already.
Persona 4 Arena Ultimax
I'm a fan of Persona 4 and Persona 3. Therefore, I enjoy it. The save files I got in this second-hand PS3 I bought already have all the story completed, and thank God for that. Say whatever you want about the story itself, but the dialogues are dumb and overly long and literally no part of the monologues are useful. I much prefer the Arcade Mode's streamlined dialogues and story.
The game itself is extremely solid, though. It takes my eyes a while to adjust to the bright and busy visual design, but now I'm just in love. I still won't recommend it to fighting game fans who aren't already fans of Persona 4 and/or 3, though. Because of spoilers, and because that's where 80% of the charm comes from.
Cultist Simulator
I have a review for this due in one way or another. As with everything Alexis Kennedy made, it is thoroughly my thing and I enjoy it. Plunging into the unknown? Eldritch abominations right around the bend? Lots of delicious words to read? Yeah. My thing.
I haven't been playing it as much, however, for the same reason that I don't play a lot of Civilization. The game has that addicting "just one more turn" tick, although here it's more like, "just until that timer finishes, so I can move the result to this other timer, and then combine it with that card over there so I can use the result to..." This is extremely dangerous and not something to be taken lightly.
Books
Max Havelaar by Multatuli
This book title shows up in every middle-to-high school history books in the country, claimed to be partly responsible for the independence of Indonesia from Dutch colonization. My book report isn't quite concerned on whether or not that's true, but it's not something I can avoid saying over and over again.
This is for school, but I enjoyed reading it, in a mildly masochistic away. Honestly, it's not very well-written, but it's super interesting narratively in how it handles its multiple conflicting narrators and anachronistic threads. I think that's even more interesting than the whole "killing colonialism" thing, but alas, this is an assignment for Civic Education, not Literature Studies.
Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
My second full rereading. Nowadays I hardly ever reread a book in a full. Once I finish a book, I have a license to read from a random page or skip around to the parts I like. And Good Omens is very good as something you skip around once you've finished the entire thing.
But I'm rereading it in full this time. It's gets a bit long-winded in some parts, but it's really, very good. I laugh out loud, something which I never do, a lot when reading it.
Projects and Other Such Things
School Assignments
I'm writing a case study about heck if I know because we haven't even decided on anything. A pretend event report about a pretend company. And a short paper on possible solutions to bigotry, racism, and islamophobia. I dislike the fact that this particular one has to be a "solution to a problem". Seems like the world is too complicated for anyone to make a solution to. The best we can hope for is move to the least bad direction.
And all these assignments are group-based. I hate group-based assignments. They're designed to be too hard for one person and yet it's always usually one person who bear all the load.
Japanese Kanji
I'm currently using Wanikani to learn the basic kanji. It's a pretty good flash-card-style app. Get shown a kanji, then input the meaning or how to read it. Do this often enough and you'll master it. I love this kind of language-learning tools because of how mindless it is while also making me feel like I'm training my mind. Wanikani gives us mnemonics to remember the kanji, but I usually prefer to make my own mnemonics or to just etch certain things to my subconscious.
Wanikani doesn't advise us to write the kanji down, but I find writing kanji therapeutic. I'm also doing it because that's how I learn hiragana: I just draw the symbols over and over and over again until I have it all in memory. Writing things down is good for memories, folks.
French
Grand Papier has plenty of great webcomics in French. I'm currently reading Dr Cataclysm by Mortis Ghost (of the game OFF fame), which is weird and interesting and not too complicated linguistically. I still have to go back and forth between reading it and looking up a dictionary, but I'm also writing down and memorising all the new words I get. It's a pretty fun way to learn new vocabulary. Not as mindless as digital flash cards ala Wanikani, but it's a good way to see how the language is used in the wilds, I think.
