It's kind of a thing for me to write a blogpost listing the games/books/projects/movies/etc I've been enjoying, along with like a mini-review of each. It's not regularly scheduled. The last one was from June? The Summer's End one was kind of one, although it only focused on my personal projects. The posts tend to be tagged status, mixed in with other posts, although you can probably see them by searching "playlist".
... No, actually there's another one, from July 2018 which I titled Reading List instead.
And I'm saying all this because this is something that I just realized, that it's sort of a regular feature in my blog, if you can call something that gets posted twice a year as regular. I know this blog isn't the neatest of web-places, seeing as it's just another place for me to talk to the void with more space and permanence than Twitter, so it's kind of... comforting? to see something that's regular. Makes it easier to see how I changed (or don't) from time to time, to see what actually happened when, to see that passage of time.
And, well, I like writing these things because it's easy and fun. Good way to get words out of my head before getting ready to work on something more important.
Anyway, this is what I got now.
Books
Not a lot of books this year. Instead I've been scouring the internet more. Did I mention I've been reading fanfic again? Archives of Our Own is full of chaff but sometimes there are gems. But usually it's full of chaff. Sometimes I want to read chaff, okay?
I'm reading Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steels. It's a history book, but with a strong focus: trying to figure out why certain regions ends up in the present world as being better off than the others. And it does this by going all the way to the earliest points of human history. Like, hunter-gatherer to food-producers kind of early. It's solid as hell, and a joy to read.
... It really is a joy to read, isn't it? So damn well written. I never have to go back and reread an entire sentence. It manages to patiently explains everything but without dragging its points. It knows you're probably not well-versed in the field it's currently discussing, but there's enough nods to those who are that it doesn't feel too simplified. I've been digging through countless papers for my research work and they're all terrible. They're always terrible. But this? Breath of fresh air.
I'm also recently finished reading Terry Pratchett's Making Money. It's one of the Discworld novels, and the second that featured Moist von Lipwig. As always with Pratchett, it's funny while also being profound. I laughed a lot. I felt my understanding of the society expanding a lot. Also with Pratchett in general, I had a hard time following the narration unless I just shut my brain up and read along. I appreciate the content, but his writing style isn't really my thing. This one feels particularly harder to read without much pay-off, but it's still good. Moist von Lipwig is my favourite Discworld boy.
I'm also rereading Hannu Rajaniemi's The Fractal Prince, the second book in the Quantum Thief trilogy. I wrote a review for the first book a while ago. I've since finished all three books and my opinion still stand: it's incredible, incredibly good, and incredibly well-suited for me. You know that one book that you read and it's like there's a resonance between your brain and the author's when they wrote it? Yeah, it's that kind of book for me.
This trilogy is like a different experience on a reread. Like a well-designed New Game+: you're not flailing around figuring out the mechanics, you get some power-up to speed through the boring parts, and foresight give you more insight into the plot. That first read was something special, but that second read is where you're really lapping it all up. The Fractal Prince is a bit more... fragmentary? fractal-like? than the first or third book, but it's interesting in its own ways.
Games
I've been playing a lot of Fire Emblem: Three Houses. A. Lot. I was sort of dismayed when I heard that it's a 60-to-100-hour RPG instead of a 30-hour one like the previous Fire Emblems, which I can usually beat in a month or so. 60-hour games and up take me years and years to beat, if I ever beat them at all. It took me 2 years to beat Persona 3 Portable. It took me 8 to beat Persona 4.
It took me a month to beat Fire Emblem: Three Houses, clocking in at ~100 hours, which is slightly higher than the average. I let it rest for a week or two, and then I just dived back in for a New Game+. That's pretty damn unprecedented. I still enjoy every moment too; more, in fact, since I'm playing on a higher difficulty.
Three Houses's biggest flaw has always been in how it's incredibly, laughably, easy for series veterans. Which is a huge shame because it introduces a lot of fun mechanics that you never get to think about because you never need them. Maddening difficulty, which they introduced on a free update, really shakes things up. Finally, I can appreciate all the thoughts that go into designing the system, finally.
I wrote a bit on how much I love this series, if you want to get some idea about just how much I want to appreciate that System.
I've also been playing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. It's great. I've stopped being able to play open-world AAA games because of some attention-span issues---they always give me headaches---but Breath of the Wild is lovely. It definitely helps that it has a simpler, stylized visual. Still, I think I'd enjoy it more if it has more memorable soundtracks. Playing it just makes me miss NieR.
But my sister, who doesn't play a lot of games, really like it. It's the only game that we really, truly share. We can play together or by ourselves. So one day I might take Link to explore the jungles of southern Hylia, and the next day my sis take Link to beat up monsters at the Death Mountain, and then we tell each other what silly hijinks we get ourselves into. We complement each other really nicely too: she likes to mess around, cook, and collect materials; I like to explore and advance the plot. She likes to do the puzzle temples, I just want the combat ones. So nevermind, this game is perfect, actually.
I got Tangle Tower a couple of days ago, an indie murder mystery game with a cheery tone and a wacky cast. It's lovely! The voice acting is probably the best I've heard in all of gaming, bar none. The art direction is fantastic, with so much hand-crafted details, I can't begin to guess how they did it. The dialogues and characters are great too: despite the wacky front, there's a melancholic depth that I can appreciate. It's a lovely game.
Projects
Not a lot I can say here. I'm sort-of an assistant to my professor's research this semester, although it mostly boils down to getting a random assignment every two weeks. That leaves me with a lot of free time, which I split between doing freelance translation work, freelance web admin work, and lying down on the bed whenever my migraine or any of my myriad health problem hits.
I'm also writing a long-form fanfic for Fire Emblem: Three Houses. It's been the one thing that's giving me life, the one thing that gets me up in the morning. This one has a lot of worldbuilding beyond the game canon, so I might be tempted to show it to people who are not familiar with the game, maybe. It's still in the kitchen, but here's a link to my AO3 profile, in case you want to see what else I've got.
