Bad Days Playlist

My days have been garbage lately. I would sit in front of my computer with a list of things I have to do (school assignments, research, freelance work, a couple projects) and ended up doing none of them. My headaches have been becoming worse. I thought things will be better after Eid and the family parties were over, but nope, I’m still stuck in the same old rut. And school’s starting next week, so I can’t really afford to spend three hours staring at a wall because my brain refuse to work with me.

At least I got some video games and books and other fun little things so I can cope with it when it gets really bad.

Video Games

Etrian Odyssey V, Fire Emblem Awakening, and Fire Emblem Fates have been my mainstay go-to games for a couple of months now. God bless the existence of the 3DS. They make the hours I spend in commute much more bearable.

I’m on my second playthrough of FE Awakening, mixing up my team with the units I didn’t use my first time around. It’s been great collecting new children and filling up those support conversation. The story, writing, and translation are still extremely good on my second gameplay. What did they do with the writing team? FE Fates was so bad I swore I won’t touch it again after beating Conquest. Instead I started up Birthright. And then I swore off it again. And now I’m almost at the end of Revelations. The story is terrible but the game is still crack.

Etrian Odyssey V is a good game to play on-and-off with. The gameplay is solid, but the best part about it is how I have whole interconnected stories about my ten guild members in my head. The game doesn’t ever actively encourage you to roleplay the characters, but I do it anyway. I’ve been thinking of writing it down into prose, or maybe get my friend to draw a comic with them, but I’m in a rut and writing is still hard.

I beat The Great Ace Attorney about last week. It’s not a perfect game, I admit, but it’s definitely my favourite Ace Attorney. The writing is top notch as usual, but what I’m most impressed about is the animation. Each characters have little tics to their motion, little gestures, little embellishments that make each of them expressive and unique. If anyone ever say that 3D animation make characters look stiff, I’m just gonna send them over to this game.

I’m still, on-and-off, going through Final Fantasy XIII on my PS3. I occasionally posted my progress on Twitter. It’s definitely not a good game. It, in fact, has many parts that are just plain textbook bad game design. But what the hell, I love it a lot. It’s not even my favourite Final Fantasy (that’ll be VIII) but I will still yell a lot about it. It did a lot of very weird elements to the genre, and successful or not, I want to celebrate its weirdness.

I started playing Demon’s Soul a while back, but haven’t really gotten a hang of it enough to have any opinion about it. I do like the Soulslike aesthetic in general, but, I dunno, I think my ADD-addled brain doesn’t take kindly to how it never really tells you what you’re supposed to do.

I’m also supposed to be playing 428: Shibuya Scramble, which I really enjoyed so far but whenever I thought about having to boot up my computer and Steam and then go through the lagging UI to then read a visual novel, I just thought about reaching for my bookshelf and reading an actual novel. Sorry.

Speaking of books:

Books

I’d like to preface this by begging you to please read The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi. Please. Oh, please. The Quantum Thief is legit the best novel I’ve read in years. I wrote a review about it here last month.

My uncle got back from overseas bringing his and my cousins’ stacks of books, ensuring that I will not run out of books to read for the foreseeable future. Which is nice, because I was indeed running out of books to read and was just thinking of buying some books just to fill up my shelf.

The most prized book I got is F. Scott Fitzgerald Classic Works, a giant thousand-pages hardcover monolith containing his first two novels and two short story collections. Fitzgerald is one of my favourite authors, for reasons I’m still not quite sure. I like how he writes and how he thinks through his story, even when I dislike the opulent lifestyle as shown in those stories. He writes easily, taking full use of the phrases and slang of the time: the Jazz Age, the Roaring Twenties. His writing will be incomprehensible in a couple of decades, if it isn’t already, but it really does help transports us to that era.

I mostly read the short stories, picking which to read at random. I notice that he likes to explain in the beginning of the main character’s life story, his (almost always a he) childhood, his parentage, before getting on to the plot, which itself can be as simple as a guy meeting a girl at a party. It’s nice. But I’m most interested when Fitzgerald write flat-out speculative fiction, like The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. The movie is way better, but it’s interesting to see his original thought process.

Next I have Stephen King’s ‘Salem’s Lot. I’m not really a fan of Stephen King or the painfully American setting of his stories, but I gotta admit he has skills. Lots of skills. Probably the most skilled of all fiction writer. ‘Salem’s Lot is a horror story, but I really haven’t gotten to the really spooky bits, so I can’t comment on that yet. This is a slowburn, ain’t it. It got 700+ pages and all that. It’ll take a while.

I have two history books competing for my attention: Geoffrey Blainey’s A Very Short History of the World and Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel. I like non-collece-textbook history books. I like history books that don’t give disproportionally large amount of attention to Europe the best.

I finished reading Terry Pratchett’s Going Postal a while back. Read it all in, like, three days, even though I was planning to space it out some more. Moist von Lipwig is terrific and I love all of his exploits. I tried immediately going to Making Money, Moist’s next adventure, afterwards, but, I dunno. My brain is tired of Discworld. I need some easier book to digest.

But now I’m going back for more Prachett I guess. And Gaiman. I’m randomly flipping through Good Omens, thanks to the new TV adaptation reigniting my love of the two dumbass angel and demon in it. Crowley and Aziraphale are great and has always been great and it’s a treat to see them on screen being great. “Great”.

TV Series and other shows of episodic nature

The Good Omens mini-series is so good, you guys. Like, damn. I laughed a lot with each and every episode. It’s weird and dumb and strikingly clever and fun. I got my sister, who’s never read the book or even know anything about it more than a cursory glance, to watch it with me and she loves it, so I know it’s not just the nostalgia talking. It’s great. We finished the entire dang six hours thing in two days even though I usually space out the episodes I watch.

I’m watching Book 3 of The Legend of Korra. I dropped the series after Book 2 because, wow that season is just really bad. Book 3 is definitely better, but it’s also nowhere near The Legend of Aang. That’s fine. Nothing can beat it anyway.

I’m continuing Critical Role Campaign 2, which is a nice show/stream/bunch-of-nerdy-ass-voice-actors-play-DnD-thing to just listen to while winding down. I started watching when it was only 2 episodes in. I’m currently at Episode 32. The show is currently up to episode 65. I have no hope of ever catching up.

Anyway. You should all watch Good Omens. It’s really good. I had a Prime Video subscription just for that even though Prime Video’s offering is abysmal. Good Omens is worth it.