Ramblings and musings of John Zeitler.
Sorry, folks. Today’s post just isn’t gonna happen. I’d embed the Bailout for today but I can’t… I do encourage you to check it out, though, as it’s the Fate stay/night vid I mentioned in the Tekko report.
Tomorrow’s post for the LJ is set, and will be on time, but for now, go watch video.
As you can see to the right (or here if you’re one of those weird RSS people), the Tekkoshocon 2008 report is up. I’m still working through what few photos I do have, and once I get them all into Flickr I’ll post a link to that set, but that might be a while longer. In any event, I hope you like text.
Off to the con today; weekend updates will conti– wait. I don’t do weekend updates anymore. Hrm.
Oh well. Have some Red Bull. You know I will… well, probably not, as there’s usually enough Bawls to go around at Tekko. (And I don’t want to hear any remarks from the peanut gallery about “Bawls at an anime con”.) The full Tekko report will be up… eventually.
It’s a con week, so naturally all hell has to break loose. I just hope that by the time things get settled Thursday evening I’m not going to be hyper-depressed. In any event, this entry aside, we’re likely to have some bleed-over of the anime and game content on this side of the blog this week. The LJ should be business as usual, but no promises.
I’m trying to muster up the motivation to want to play through more of Ratchet and Clank, but unfortunately my remarks over its genericity (that’s not even a word– but genericness is?) have rung true, and so at the fourth planet I’m succumbing to the crippling apathy that threatened my enjoyment so far. I’ll say this, though: getting new weapons did help to make the game a lot more enjoyable, but the fact that it’s exactly like any other platformer that’s been endemic to the PS2 since launch did not help it at all. So, it’s going back to the movie store today, a day early.
As for anime, I’ve been re-watching The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya and Ouran Host Club, for no particular reason. There’s still no schedule for Tekkoshocon, so I’ve no idea what I’m likely to see there (and I probably won’t find out until Thursday night) but I expect to do a bit of watching this year. Though I suppose it couldn’t hurt to watch a little more Kiddy Grade in the meantime.
Which reminds me– I need to update the novel word count with what I managed to eke out during lunch. Then I need to go return the movies, get dinner, think about doing the laundry, etc. etc JOHN R BUSY. Catch you all tomorrow.
(Note: Yeah, two ‘new’ Game Clears over the weekend. It does warrant mentioning, but not here– no time right now, and besides, this post is all ready to go and everything, so… yeah, tomorrow on the LJ you should see something on both the Professor and the Valkyrie.)
We’re just shy of seven weeks away from, for me at any rate, the start of anime convention season. Given that I intend to hit more than two, separated by about four to six months, yes, it is a “season”. ahem I’m running into the wonderful scheduling conflicts that pop up now and again, including the fact that one of the more accessible ‘new’ cons is the exact same weekend as Tekkoshocon (UB-Con, which wouldn’t irritate me as much if it wasn’t going to have a ‘playable demo’ of D&D 4th Edition). Still, it’s worth me making yet another resolution to you all: I’m going to do writeups of these conventions. I promise, this time– no excuses this year.
Last year I had notes during Tekkoshocon, and had mentioned that I wanted to expand those into a full report. Then, some Bad Things Happened, and I became depressed, so you got no report. For that, I truly apologize; the convention was very good and a true treat to go to, but there were other circumstances surrounding it (quite literally, actually) that caused me to not want to write it up until long after its events were obliviated from my mind in sufficient detail to do it justice. I did come away from it with a couple of interesting lessons: first, despite my best efforts, I cannot sleep in my car, even if I really, really want to. Second, do not schedule anything important or life-changing within one week on either side of the convention unless you want said things to go horribly, atrociously wrong. And finally, marathonning series is a good idea in theory; in practice, I had better make sure the seats are actually comfortable enough to warrant sitting in them for greater than three hours at a time before committing to it.
In any event, that is the half-assed excuse for not having a Tekko report. There really is no excuse for not having anything up from Otakon ‘07 besides the “Rick Star” video, so I’m not even really going to apologize. About the only thing that I can say in defense of the silence, really, is that for that trip (and given my state of disconnectedness from being an otaku at the time) the focus was not specifically on the convention, but rather on the people with whom I attended the festivities. Therefore, most of the most memorable ‘things’ that happened wound up being kind of personal to be blasting out all over the Interwebs. Now, that said, a few things– such as the remark regarding the “‘Elite Beat’-off”, and being literally three minutes too late for a Pokemon event across town– those are pretty much universally interesting. The rest would probably just be incomprehensible inside jokes, and I think there’s enough cliques out there in the world that the omission of these particular shared memories will go largely unnoticed.
Still, I can’t believe he played through all thirty-five minutes of it. Holy crap. ANYWAY.
Pez actually inspired my drive to commit to full reports from Tekko and Otakon this year; he’d written up a couple of long-winded and very detailed travelogues of trips he’d taken, and they’re powerful stuff. It’s very strong nonfiction, and I think it stands up by itself; sadly, I don’t have a link to anywhere he’s elected to showcase this (hint hint), but if one shows up, I recommend taking a look. Nonfiction has always been a particular weakness of mine, and as a result I think that the Tekko report is going to be my big “writing” project. Of course, this means that I might actually have to, y’know, pay attention, and detail events more than I usually do, but… Hrm. We’ll see. It’ll also probably shoot to hell my plans for finally volunteering, but there’s always next year…. when I can actually remember to sign up on time and participate more.
We’ll see. I’m hoping that I can manage to do this in a way that doesn’t detract from my enjoyment of both cons, but we’ll see… likely, for Tekko, this will mean sitting in my car for half an hour typing up disjointed notes on the Basroil before starting the drive home each night. I somehow don’t think that would be so bad, do you?
(Xbox Live is still acting funny with regards to the gamercard up there. I’m still upset. Nothing new about either of these.)
I recently raised the point that I’m a huge game and anime/movie junkie to Rick, adding that I was about two steps from becoming a full-blown hikikomori. (This in and of itself was a nerd-joke; John McClane has something similar said about him in Die Hard With a Vengeance.) Rick responded that I do too much stuff to really be considered among the total shut-ins, but given my general social calendar, I’m damn close.
Not that I plan on changing this. Meh. Too much effort.
To turn this to the semi-serious side, though, I do have quite a bit of a gaming and anime backlog, as I’ve said many times before. Clearing out half of the Reclamation List did that nicely, so I’m likely to be in good shape for entertainment for quite some time. What this means in terms of a resolution is that I’m planning on twenty-five Game Clear notices in 2008, with five of those hopefully in the first quarter.
I’ve not prioritized my gaming very well. I have dozens of open games, the big one being Super Robot Taisen, but other notable ones being Brave Story, Twilight Princess, and Dead Rising. Still, I’ve found myself getting into a few other titles on the side which have engaged my attention at just the right time to derail an active run. So, I’m going to set out an order right now. By the time you read this, I’ll (probably) have started a run at Eternal Sonata, which is what I hope will be the first major Game Clear for 2008. (I might be wrapping up Lego Star Wars if I haven’t started ES yet; rest assured that if it’s not active when I post this, it will be started by the end of today.) I might get a minor Clear with Touch Detective or a Phoenix Wright game (I’m backed up by two on that series– please don’t hurt me, lawyer fans). After Eternal Sonata, I’m going to jump back into Valkyrie Profile with the intent of finishing it at long last.
Downtime is something I’ve also been exceptionally poor at managing. Some nights I just don’t feel like playing a game or writing, and I wind up wasting the majority of the night surfing or doing something inane when I could be watching an anime or TV series. There’s a bit to deal with there, but the point is that I’m going to make a better effort at having some ‘passive’ entertainment at the ready when I’m feeling blah. Given how I’m going to manage the ‘08 Reclamation List, I should be able to work through this at a faster pace than I have before– no more marathonning series unless I really can’t wait to see the next bits.
That does bring us to the Reclamation List. Last year I decided to hold off on buying titles at the beginning of the year based on Rick’s “moratorium” idea, and I definitely want to give it another stab. The trick of it is, though, that GameFly has been unusually good to me, and I’ve not rented a game ‘to death’ (as in to completion). After the Achievement Race ends on the 19th, though, the plan is to treat GameFly games as half-purchases: I can send it back if I think it sucks, but if I feel like playing it more than about five hours or so, it stays until completed.
Now, that does nothing for the actual purchases. Since I’ve been looking forward to Brawl since, well, the Wii was announced, that one is a guaranteed purchase. Professor Layton is also a series I want to show support for, so that’s also an allowed exception unless I have fewer than two Game Clears by February 10th (if I only have one, Layton waits). And, since I’ve proven myself completely incapable of preventing myself from purchasing games, for each Game Clear I rack up from January 1st to March 31st, I will pick up one GameCube game from the Reclamation List; if I reclaim all GameCube games, I can continue with some of the more common PS2 games. (The reason for this restriction is because the ‘Cube shelf is woefully underfilled.) After April 1st, the ban will be either relaxed or broken depending on how many Clears I’ve racked up.
Finally, reclaiming anime and movies work on slightly different rules. I have four unwatched series right now (Ai Yori Aoshi, Air, Sailor Moon, and Strawberry Marshmallow), a live-action series untouched (Veronica Mars S2), and a handful of rewatches cued up (Ah! My Goddess TVS1, Love Hina, Firefly/Serenity, the Matrix films, and Lord of the Rings Extended Editions). I won’t reclaim any DVDs from the List until two of the five unwatched sets are complete. Once that’s done, I can reclaim one series, but after that I can’t reclaim anything until I’ve collected the remainder of School Rumble and finished two more of the five unwatched. At that point, I get another reclamation before I finish up the other two unwatched (School Rumble being added to the initial five).
Yeah. It’s complicated, but I think I can stick to it this year. All I have to do is get through to April and then I can revise as needed. Tomorrow– New Year’s Eve– I’ll talk a little bit about how TFO.net itself will be changing in 2008.
So, we’re coming up on the end of 2007. It’s been a good year, to be honest; lots of little things went very right, which far more than made up for the things that went wrong. Rather than detail everything, I figure it’s best to just say “it was a good year” and move forward.
There’s some developments recently that are worth mentioning. I hit the used movie store with some of the Christmas money and managed to reach over 50% collected on the Reclamation List. Which was a pretty big goal for me, actually, especially given that I expected it to take a lot longer and a lot more money than it actually did. (For those of you keeping score at home, that’s 59 items reclaimed of 117, with another 24 items on top of that listed as ‘will not reclaim’. For an overall percentage, I’m just shy of 71% done.) Some were multiple items (I counted the Matrix Trilogy as one item, even though I bought the discs separately), and others are somewhat more difficult to find or afford (read: Lunar, several PS1 titles). As a result, over the coming weekend I’m going to redesign the Reclamation List, put a couple more items onto it, and have a fresh sheet ready for 2008.
And I will ignore that list due to trying to work through the Backlog of Moderate Annoyance. I’m taking a page from Rick’s moratorium on purchases, and re-establishing it on my own end for the first few months. The only planned purchases right now are Smash Brawl and Professor Layton, both in February– and Prof. Layton might be dropped off if I don’t have at least two Game Clears before the 10th. The earliest I’d be looking to work on Reclamation List ‘08 would probably be the end of March or the middle of April, when Tekkoshocon happens.
Speaking of Tekkoshocon. I decided to double-check the date for the coming year and found that the venerable convention– which has been at the Monroeville ExpoMart for the two years that I was in attendance– is actually changing venues, jumping across town to a different convention center. This is because the ExpoMart is being demolished. I guess the pungent aroma of Otaku Funk was just too much for the hall to bear… or, more likely, it was just damn old. Which it is. But I like my explanation better, because it makes my chosen subculture feel more important and mainstream than we really are. *ahem* Anyway, I’m hoping that Mad Gear shows up in the Dealer’s Room this year; yeah, yeah, commercialism is bad, but I like them, and their staff is very friendly.
Hey, that takes us nicely to game news. It’s amazing how smoothly I link these things, huh? Anyway, a couple of things worth mentioning here; I found this morning that Marvelous Interactive, who publish the Harvest Moon and Luminous Arc series in Japan, are opening a US division within the year. On the one hand, I’m thrilled that another niche publisher is taking the plunge on a US distribution arm, but on the other hand, it means that we’re likely going to be getting an unproven translation team for Luminous Arc 2. Which worries me greatly.
Oooh, SimCity DS 2 looks to be using the MySims art style! I like that. It’ll probably never leave Japan, but I like it.
There’s also some other things coming up, but I’ll go ahead and use those for the next couple of days’ entries. Stay tuned, folks: we’re going to become staunchly resolute before the year is out.
So, today is the day before Christmas. We’re looking at Bailout borrowed from Eric today, but I promise, tomorrow I’ll have brand new Bailout brought by the jolly man himself. John Hodgman. Wait, no, I mean Santa Claus. (In my defense, they are similar-looking.) Have a good day and sleep well tonight, if at all.
No, it’s not the Who song. But, it does sound like an interesting trailer. And where have I heard “The Dark is Rising” before? Incidentally, tomorrow we’ll have a regular post, I imagine.
Yeah. Tired and not really willing to type much right now. I’ll try to get something unadulterated by adjectives up for tomorrow. Maybe.
