Ladies and gentlemen, David Bowie.
Hello again everyone. I'm back with yet another monthly update. Don't worry, this won't be another long and somewhat disjointed rant like last month's post was. As one might guess from the above music video, change has sort been the theme for my life during this past month. There have been changes I've been trying to make of my own accord and other changes that I'm being forced to make or at least being forced to consider making do to various unfortunate circumstances. I'm not going to talk about the latter type of changes because they involve matters that I feel are too personal to post on a site like this. Plus I want this to be a positive post.
I will say this on the matter though. One thing I've learned during my forty years of existence on this planet is that life expects us to make changes every now and then, and if we stand still for too long, life has a way of forcing changes upon those. Such changes are often the kind we don't want, so it's important to try and keep moving and recognize when to make changes, otherwise we lose a lot of the choice we have regarding what those changes will be. That said, I've never really done a good job of practicing what I preach when it comes to change. If I was, I wouldn't have some of the problems I'm having now.
Anyway, I'd like to use this post to talk about a change I've been trying to make of my own accord, and it's kind of become one of my big projects for this spring and summer. My collection of manga and other books has at last grown to the point where I need four bookcases instead of just three. Now I have tried going digital, but that is one change I continue to struggle with. I have an Amazon Kindle, but I hardly ever use the dang thing. Plus I just like going to bookstores too much.
Getting back to bookcases, I have figured out where I can put a fourth one. In my room I have an old dresser that only serves as a T.V. stand. I also used the dresser as a spot for an old table lamp that I used to light my room. I had the lamp in question placed on a corner of the dresser behind the T.V. It occurred to me that I could replace that old dresser with a medium-sized bookcase that I could place my flatscreen T.V. on, but making this happen would be a long process with multiple steps.
I took the first step at or around the start of the month, which was to replace the table lamp I had been using with a wall-mounted unit placed in around the same spot. I ended up needing my dad's help with this, as I'm still not super great with tools. One mistake I made with this step in the process was just buying the cheapest wall lamp I could find on Amazon. I mean it serves the intended purpose fairly well, but it was a pain in the butt to assemble and install, plus it doesn't give off quite as much light as the table lamp I used. So now my room has a lighting issue, but that's a problem I'll save for another time.
Once I got the wall lamp installed, the second step in this process was emptying out the old dresser. For the past few years I had been using most of the drawers to store the bulk of my Yu-Gi-Oh card collection. We now come to a part in my story that I feel may shock some of you reading. I decided to sell off most of my Yu-Gi-Oh cards. Now I'd be lying if I said this was a hard decision to make, but it was not one that I made lightly either.
The Yu-G-Oh franchise was kind of a big part of my life for a few years, and one that I think of fondly.
- The original series is a classic.
- GX was a pretty good sequel.
- 5D's was awesome (except for the fact that Yusei and Aki didn't get together at the end).
- ZEXAL was... meh (I did like the Barian Emperors, and the Numbers were kind of a cool concept).
- ARC-V was outstanding, except for its terrible ending, which I try very, very hard not to think about.
As for VRAINS, well... it had a promising start, but I generally try not to think of VRAINS because the production was handled so poorly that it kind of murdered the franchise. I mean most of us remember what happened. They essentially canceled VRAINS and replaced it with the Saturday morning cartoon show that was Yu-Gi-Oh SEVENS, which had its own separate kid version of the card game. Meanwhile the original card game became an over-competitive pseudo sport that only teaches nerds how to be bigger dicks to one another.
Some years ago I downloaded a Yu-Gi-Oh video game onto my Switch Lite; it was more of a mobile game actually. The big feature of this game was being able to duel other players online, and I honestly didn't enjoy it. A lot of the strategies involved preventing the opponent from making a single move by using these twenty-plus card combos, which is not a fun duel in my opinion. For me a fun duel should be a back and forth between the duel players, a series of moves and countermoves. That's what made the duels in the anime and manga so fun to watch.
Plus the only thing the original card game has going for it any more is nostalgia, and that can only go so far. Today the card game is like one of those losers who peaked in high school and then spends all their free time reminiscing about their glory days over and over again. I do have friends online who try and keep me in the loop about the new cards that come out, and it seems like a lot of the new cards that come out these days are callbacks to Duelist Kingdom or other parts of the original series, or GX, or 5D's or whatever. They're making cards as tributes to anime shows that have been done for years now. In some ways, that just kind of pathetic.
Sorry, I didn't mean to go so negative just now. I should also mention that I didn't sell off my entire collection. I went through everything and picked out certain cards that I wanted to hold onto for sentimental reasons, and because I still care about the franchise. I mostly held onto anything related to the Egyptain God Cards, anything rare related to 5D's, certain cards that I have my own special memories attached to, and a bunch of cards related to ARC-V. I also held onto certain decks that I built, like the Speedroid deck that I put together mainly as research for an ARC-V fanfic I wrote as a tribute to Yugo and Rin.
Incidentally, I've started reposting the ARC-V fanfic in question on AO3. So far I've been posting only one chapter a week, as I may decide to make some significant edits to some of the later chapters. I have no intention of writing any new Yu-Gi-Oh fanfics in the future, but I felt like this was one story that deserved to exist on another site besides FFN. Incidentally, it seems like FFN has really started to go downhill lately. I don't know if anyone reading as seen the site's main page lately, but it does not look good at all.
Getting back to my project of obtaining a new bookcase, I got seven-hundred and fifty bucks for the cards I sold off, which was actually a lot more money I had expected. That brings us to the next step in this project, which is selecting a new bookcase. I learned my lesson with the wall lamp and went out to an actual store to pick one out. While I did eventually find a bookcase that will be perfect for my needs, I've yet to actually purchases it. This is mostly due to the final step of the project, which is getting rid of the old dresser.
I've yet to figure out how to get rid of the blasted thing. I can't just store it somewhere in the basement because there's no space down there. I also can't exactly sell the dresser because it's not exactly in peak condition. For one thing, the bottom drawer doesn't close all the way anymore. I'm a little tempted to just get an axe, chop the dresser up into a bunch of pieces, take them out to a vacant lot somewhere, and set them on fire. Such a solution would probably be a little too extreme though, plus I imagine that it would violate a few fire safety laws and at least a couple of city ordinances.
It did occur to me today though that I could try donating the dresser to some outfit. Of course the other part of the problem is transporting the dresser. I may have no other choice but to hire a couple of guys with a truck for that part. Getting that blasted piece of furniture out of my room is a two-person job at least. I may have no other choice but to ask my dad for help again, but I want to do as much of this project by myself as I can.
That about covers it for this month, I think. The only other thing worth mentioning is that my writing has still been going pretty well. For the last couple of weeks I've been working on a Digimon fanfic I had been blocked on for about a year. Beyond that, there's not much else to report. Until the day we meet again.
