Getting Tired Of My Favorite Type Of Snack Media

For a pretty significant portion of my life, I was (at the VERY least) receptive to the idea that you sometimes just needed to get back up and try again whenever you failed. I’d grown up on that idea, caught in an inescapable bad living situation through no fault of my own, so it was a sentiment that appealed to me. Even as I got older, my problems changed, and everything stopped being a waiting game until I could finally escape it (like my home growing up), the message still resonated with me. I’m a pretty soft touch, after all. My heart is near the surface and moves easily, so any story about grit and determination and carrying on despite impossible odds could tug on my heart strings. That’s probably why I was pretty receptive to Shonen anime (“shonen” here being a genre of anime classicaly aimed towards young boys, featuring adventure and fighting and easily-digested morality typically dispensed around or within the aforementioned fighting, thereby showing the righteousness of the heroes’ ideals when they emerged victorious from combat against their hated foe) as a whole when I was introduced to it. So much of it features characters that are the living embodiment of “just try again/harder and you’ll eventually succeed!” and I was pretty much always down to watch whatever. Not everything needs to be high art and sometimes fun can be fun and a cheap tug at the heartstrings will play you just as well as a subtle and artful thrum. It never really bothered me, especially considering that I don’t actually watch a lot of anime as a whole, so I never interrogated it.

Continue reading

On My “To-Enjoy” List For 2024

This is my first post after my vacation. I actually wrote it yesterday (which means that everything you’ve read up to this point was written, reviewed, and scheduled before the 22nd of December), because I was so exhausted that I actually got sick for a bit there. Not with a cold or Covid or anything. Just exhausted enough that I felt terrible in a lot of ways. So, instead of taking a long weekend and making up for my days off by spending a little extra time working in the days after my break, I decided to just not do anything and then, starting the first non-holiday of 2024, write two blog posts every day for a week. It will be pretty easy, considering how much time I’ve had for reading, watching shows, playing games, and spending time with people I care about. All of which wasn’t enough to actually make a dent in my backlog of stuff to read, play, and watch even if it did provide me with plenty of stuff to write about. I did make a pretty significant dent in my gaming backlog, though, so that’s nice. It got bigger though, not long after, since I got games as gifts this holiday season. I’ve got so much to do, still. Well, that I want to do. I don’t NEED to do most of it. I just want to do a lot of it.

Continue reading