Odds and Ends

Though I haven’t played video games with any regularity in several years, there are a few games that I still remember very fondly and even revisit once in a great while. A couple of my favourites are the two fantasy-themed Ogre Battle games, both the Super NES original and its Nintendo 64 sequel. For years, I’ve also owned the two Tactics Ogre spin-off games, but never really played either of them until now, and I’ve just finished the PlayStation port of Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together.

As I mentioned in my last Bibliophile’s Journal post, I recently read one of St. Thomas Aquinas’s Biblical commentaries. Since I have a lot of time to kill at work and not a lot of time to read at home, at least recently, most of my reading is from blogs and Twitter. These, however, never really satisfy me, and St. Thomas’s commentary made me realise just how unsatisfying they are.

Twitter is fine for sharing links, aphorisms, and especially snark, but I greatly prefer a thorough treatment of a subject. This is why I never tweet about politics or religion - I want to explain things. Many times I’ve seen a tweet that catches my interest, and I’d love to hear a more; one that’s nagged on me, for example, was a comment on how Tanigawa Nagaru, in his Suzumiya Haruhi novel series, often grapples with how the world often just isn’t amazing. I respect the opinion of that tweeter (twitterer?) and would love to hear him expand on this, because that theme is, I think part of what draws me to the series - and this frustration is just on a light novel; imagine how much room for expansion there is on a political or philosophical topic!

A couple months ago, I put my Japanese study on hiatus and bought a copy of French for Reading, by Carl Sandburg and Edison Tatham. I did so partly because four years of studying Japanese started beating me down. Though I’d made several strides with James Heisig’s book Remembering the Kanji, my progress with that slowed to a crawl. So, I decided to move to a textbook that could be completed relatively quickly, but still give me something to show for my efforts at the end.

It occured to me about a week ago that I didn’t have enough literature on my shelves. Though my bookshelves groan under the weight of my books, novels and poetry make up less than a third of them. Non-fiction makes up about a third, and the most represented genre are the graphic novels, though the number of volumes per series gives that contingent an unfair advantage.

Anyway, I wanted to read some good fiction or poetry, so off I went, and have set myself even more hopelessly behind in my reading backlog. I found good stuff, and for cheap too (they were all used), but I look at this list of books I got and despair. I list only those books I’ve purchased in the last seven days.

I spent this past weekend at A-Kon, one of two anime conventions held in the Dallas area and the longest-running convention in the US (AFAIK). I had fun spending time with my sister and meeting with a couple friends, which is typically the highlight of any convention anyway, and also went to a pretty good panel on Kon Satoshi given by Helen McCarthy and Daniel Briscoe, but honestly I probably won’t go next year.

I bought the Kindle 2 early last Spring, but despite using it heavily through the following Summer I’ve essentially abandoned the device, not having used it for a few months now.

Partly the reasons are just practical things that will likely be (and in some cases have been) alleviated in future versions. No colour, no support for Japanese text, spotty availability for books I want, lousy formatting for others, and a few other nuisances. To the Kindle’s credit, there is still a lot of material available, I do like the iPhone app, and I especially like how it handles annotations and dicionary lookup.

So, nico nico now has an English version of their website [Note from 2024: the site is now dead],  and they’re doing a live broadcast from SakuraCon. Having comments appear directly on a video seems like it’d be really damn annoying, but honestly I’m finding it a lot more fun than YouTube. That may just be novelty value, but somehow it feels more like you’re interacting with other commenters than having comments appear just below the video as on other sites. Of course, the comments are pretty much smartass central, but I’m not one to take anything on the internet seriously anyway.

The last Pokemon game I bought was Red back in 1998, which I played so thoroughly over the next year or so that the resulting burnout has lasted over ten years now. A few days ago, while at work, I felt a strong urge to play again. Who knows why? The next day, though, I bought a copy of the recently-released Pokemon: White Version (not Black, because I prefer to hang around Pokemon that look like me lulz). Anyway, I thought the impressions of a prodigal Pokemon fan may interest those who’ve kept up with the series, so I’ll share my thoughts so far.

I wonder a bit at the utility of making a Summer Reading List. Last year, though I read a lot, what I read only about half resembled the list. Perhaps such an activity is less about a plan than a general goal: “I want to read roughly this amount, and what I read will likely include several of the following.”

Alternatively, making lists is just fun. So, here goes.

Paradiso - Dante (trans. Allen Mandelbaum). I’ve already started this one, actually. Having finished and greatly enjoyed Inferno and Purgatorio, Paradiso is obligatory. Reading a parallel-text edition only makes it more fun.

Finals are done. With that, summer begins.

I subscribe to the school of thought that states that spring, fall, and winter all properly belong to school. Summer, however, has a sacredness about it that is profaned by classes. Summer classes are, frankly, an abomination, and though I realise that they are necessary for some, I have only scorn for those who would destroy their summer vacation willingly.

Not that my summer will be completely free, of course. Besides a part-time job and mowing the lawn regularly, I have also a few goals set out for myself. The first is to build up my art skills a bit for a drawing class I’ll take in the fall. Second is to avoiding forgetting everything I’ve learned in Japanese the last two semesters. The third is to tackle a summer reading programme I’ve developed for myself - perhaps “programme” is too ambitious, but anyway it’s a list of what I’d like to read in the coming months. The early version looks like this: