Been having trouble writing (or being productive) again. School's been done for, about two weeks, now? I got a rewritten game review out, I'm bashing my head against the wall making a new version of my homepage. There's a story I'm stewing on that is supposed to be done by tomorrow and yet I can't even get all the plot made together.
But school is done for a year and I have plenty enough of free time to tackle my mounting backlog.
Books
I got a Kindle recently! Amazon isn't a thing where I live, neither is e-books devices, or e-books in general, so this magical slab of plastic is pretty rare around here. I like how easily I can buy/get books, I love how light it is, and it's rad that I can read it with just one hand; make all those train trips easier. Here are things I'm reading with it.
Earthsea
I read A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tomb of Atuan, and The Farthest Shore, the first three books. This is my first exposure to Ursula K. Le Guin's works and boy, I shouldda started earlier. I love these books so much for so many reasons. I love that the setting is an archipelago, and one that somehow mimics and yet is very different to my home country. It's both Fantasy with capital F but also has so many bits and pieces and general atmosphere that reminds me of IRL home, and that's something that no other fantasy setting has ever done to me.
These Earthsea books must be the wisest books I've ever read. It's never tropey morals-of-the-story, but wisdom that feels hard-earned, and even when the older characters in the book say it outright, it never feels preachy. It handles its heavy topic extremely well. The first book is about fighting (an eldritch representation of) Depression, and the second is about leaving an abusive relationship (with the aforementioned god of Depression). The third is about finding the meaning of life in sight of death. It's beautiful and hopeful and it never gets too dark even though it acknowledge the darkness surrounding us.
Man, I really wish I read these when I was younger.
The Philip K. Dick Reader
Man, reading PKD after Le Guin is like diving to different tail end of 60-70s SF. PKD's short stories are imaginative and wild and everything like how I remember the old science fiction stories I read as a kid: full of twists and monsters. What I didn't expect is how mildly racist, sexist and generally devoid of hope they are. There's senseless violence, deceitful technocracies, murderous aliens, generic male action protagonists, et cetera et cetera. There's a lot of interesting ideas and a lot of interesting twists that made me grin in glee. His short stories are also very easy to read, which is great. But it's like each of these stories exude an aura of unpleasantness.
My favourite story is The Eyes Have It, in which a man who has just read a romance novel thought it was a sign of aliens hiding in everyday life, because he is too dense to understand similes like "she gave him her hand" or "he has absolutely no guts" or "his eyes moved from person to person". It's simple but very clever.
Games
Professor Layton and the Miracle Mask
I stopped playing the Professor Layton series a long while ago, when the 3DS games started appearing and I don't have the console. I do now, so nevermind that I'm half a decade late, I'm still continuing on!
It's, well, it's the good Professor we know and love, who can't walk five steps without being seeing a puzzle. Miracle Mask's puzzles are pretty good. Some are bland, some are very creative, none has made us go "huh?" at the solution yet, so that's a good sign. I'm playing this with my sister, so when I get stuck with a puzzle, she helps me out and vice versa. It overall feels easier than the previous games, but I am half a decade older than I was when I last played it.
Story-wise, it's no Unwound Future, but this one dived into Professor Layton's past and I am so digging it. The Professor has always struck me like someone who held a nasty, messy past, hidden under the extraordinarily calm demeanour.
Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney: Dual Destinies
Same case as with Professor Layton, I stopped following the Ace Attorney series after the 3DS games, although I have an additional reason here: the lead writer, Shu Takumi, stopped working on the series after the fourth game. The fifth game, Dual Destinies, proceed to throw every over-arching plot points from the previous game into the dustbin.
I'm still upset about that, but as I'm playing I try to treat it as a brand new game, and it's actually pretty good that way. The twists, in so far as I've played, are lousy. The puzzle aspects are also pretty lousy. This game is the first in the serious with voice acting, voice acting which I also think is pretty lousy. But the characters are wild and fun and a lot more endearing than I expected, so honestly, it's not a bad game at all.
Etrian Odyssey Untold: The Millennium Girl
I want to say Etrian Odyssey is good dumb fun because it's the game of choice when I was sick and and stuck at home. Except, it's a game of lots of numbers, careful movement, "ah darn it I forget to do this thing so now I gotta battle with a handicap", and quite a number of deaths by the dumbest mistakes. So in other words, a JRPG.
I haven't quite articulated why it's so fun to crawl through the maze and fight the same monsters over and over again and seeing the number gets bigger and bigger. I'll get back to you on that.
One thing I can note is this: I have terrible sense of space. In this game you gotta (in-game) draw the map of the maze yourself. I think it's helping me a bit, drawing the map. More games should let me draw a map in-game.
Projects
Geez, I think most of my other projects are eaten alive by this one down here.
My Homepage
I genuinely like the aesthetic I already have here, but the colour scheme is hell for when you're reading a single story there. Considering that I want to make it the de-jure place to read my stories (as opposed to my unorganized blog), I figure I gotta make it more read-able.
The new homepage is almost done. I'm just... really bad at graphic design and can't quite get it to look right. Coding is also currently a nightmare to deal with, so I don't know when I'll be done with it.
Translating Vienne of Seperfine
I'm translating Vienne of Seperfine, a short side-story to the graphic novel Unsounded, to Indonesian. It's just a little thing I do for fun and practice. Unsounded is rife with dialects and English-based magic terminologies and Ashley Cope's writing is flowing with metaphors, so it's an interesting one to tackle.
I may or may not put the finished work here, if I finish it.
