Back in February, my mother-in-law came to visit my wife and I at our new home, and over dinner she told me that she was counting on me to teach our daughter Chinese. My wife insisted that she was joking, and I am sure that she’s right, but I wouldn’t let that stop me - I decided that I was going to learn Chinese.
Now, my interest in China and the Chinese language has, until relatively recently, been limited to the Confucian canon and the historical context needed to understand it.
It’s October and Halloween is just around the corner, so now’s a perfect time to bring out Tales of Mystery and Imagination. Not the compilation of Edgar Allan Poe stories, though that’s good, too, but the Alan Parsons Project album based on various Poe stories and poems, though most aren’t from that specific collection - only “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Cask of Amontillado,” and “The Fall of the House of Usher.
So, the semester is well underway, you have a heavy load of coursework to do, a full time job, a blog you need to update, a woman you’re attempting to woo, a library to volunteer at, all in addition to the normal errands and chores and unforeseen tasks to do. It’s a lot, so how do you deal with so much work? Obviously, you dive into the sprawling 40+ hour campaign of Ogre Battle 64: Person of the Lordly Caliber, the best game of its era and, for me, the best of any era - with one massive, almost game-wrecking caveat, which we’ll get to shortly.
The biggest surprise I’ve ever given my parents was last year when I told them that I was getting into professional wrestling. My online presence here and on Twitter reflects my real-life interests and hobbies closely, and as you can tell from a scan of my article and review index most of what I read and watch leans toward high culture. I’ll dip into popular culture with things like Devilman now and then, but overall I’m more likely to be reading French poetry or something.
‘Of course’, said Queequeg. ‘Man want to die, nothing can save him. Man want to live, only God can kill him - or whale or storm, maybe’.
Recently, while shelving books in my library’s children’s section, I noticed a picture book with an especially striking cover and was somewhat surprised to see the title, Moby Dick. Herman Melville’s Great American Novel is hardly something I expected to find on the kid’s fiction shelves, but I was curious about how it would be adapted so I checked it out.
Once again, it’s time for me to look at the past year in bibliophilia. In 2018 I read thirty-six books, down from 2017’s forty-two, though considering this was also the year I started graduate school I’m actually pretty happy with that number.
Of those thirty-six, eight were poetry. Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses, Guido Cavalcanti: Complete Poems (trans. Cirigliano), Dante’s Rime (trans. Nichols and Mortimer), Virgil’s Aeneid (trans. Fitzgerald), Homer’s Iliad (trans.
Looking at the state of Christianity, the lack of unity is disconcerting, as “each has a cry of his own, I am for Paul, I am for Apollo, I am for Cephas, I am for Christ.” Those in favour of ecumenism sometimes go too far, but it’s hard not to sympathise with their goal of fostering more unity among Christians, as long as it can be done without falling into indifferentism.
Recently, I’ve been working my way through Scripture, and one thing it’s reminded me of is how wild the Old Testament gets, particularly in the Book of Judges. It makes one fully appreciate why the sacred author says twice, including the very conclusion of the book, that “In those days there was no king in Israel: but every one did that which seemed right to himself.” The only times that Israel wasn’t a near anarchic, heathen-ridden mess was under the guidance of the judges.
I recently received the book Medieval Monsters, an art book collecting illustrations from various medieval manuscripts, by Damien Kempf and Maria L. Gilbert, as a gift, and it’s one of those books whose main flaw is that it’s not big enough. That is, I wish it were bigger both in the sense of having more content and just being physically larger. At just 6" x 7.5", this is the smallest art book I own.
The short review of Tactics Ogre: The Knight of Lodis is that it’s Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together but smaller.
Not that it’s a small game by any means, especially for the Game Boy Advance. It’s shorter and has fewer classes and side-quests, but I easily got thirty hours of gameplay out of it, and could see myself replaying it in the future to see the other endings. The graphics and music are both appealing, and look pretty good for a portable game, and though the story and characters aren’t as good as the original game, they’re still enjoyable.