Ladies and gentlemen, the Moody Blues.
Greetings all. I'm back once more with another of my monthly updates. I did something kinda fun during the first few days of the month. I rewatched Revolutionary Girl Utena and Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury back-to-back in order to do a side by side comparison of both shows. To say that G-Witch is simply Revolutionary Girl Utena with giant robots and Shakespeare references is a gross over simplification. G-Witch has its own identity, but that being said it really did take quite a bit from Utena. There were quite a few little scenes or moments in G-Witch that I recognized from Utena, but many of those similar moments were basically turned on their head. In any case, both shows are different enough from each other that they're fun to watch back-to-back.
My viewing of Utena and G-Witch aside though, this has actually a pretty rough month for me. One of my bigger difficulties had to do with my current job. For a couple of weeks my hours had been cut more drastically than they'd ever been cut before. They're back to about what they were before right now, but for a couple of weeks I was left wondering whether or not I still actually had a job. The thing is my work hours do tend to fluctuate quite a bit, which is of course one of the reasons why I've been trying to get a new job.
Another of this month's big highlights happened last week. I was trying to back out of a parking space, and this idiot essentially parked his van right in the middle of the aisle, and he was right in my blind spot, so I wound up backing right into him. His vehicle was totally unharmed, but now I have a big dent in my rear bumper. We didn't exchange insurance info because:
- A. His vehicle didn't have a scratch on it.
- B. I was technically the one at fault anyway.
Perhaps we should've exchanged insurance anyway, but like I said, I feel like an insurance investigation would've declared that I was the one at fault. Of why the hell that idiot had his van parked in the middle of the road like that is anybody's guess. He probably stopped his van to answer a text or something, not that I or anyone else could prove that; I'm just making a theory. Either way, if I made deal out of the incident, it'd only just cost me even more money. In any case, now my car has to go back into the bodyshop in a couple of weeks to get the rear bumper replaced.
There is more unpleasantness from this month to report, though the next couple of items are small compared to the two incidents I just spoke of, but the small things tend to add up. This first item has to do with some books I was trying to obtain. Near the end of last month I streamed an anime called Roll Over and Die, and I liked the anime so much that I wanted to give the original light novel series a try. So I went about ordering all six of the currently available volumes of the series online. Unfortunately I had a devil of a time ordering Volume 4. For whatever reason, Barnes & Noble didn't have the book in stock, and it was the same story with every other book store I could think of. Hell, I couldn't even find the book on Amazon or the Crunchyroll Store website.
The only place that did seem to have Volume 4 of the series in stock was Walmart. So, I ordered the first three volumes of Roll Over and Die from B&N, and the last three from Walmart. Of course it took ages for Volume 4 to arrive, and the book showed clear signs that it had been used. It's still in fairly good shape, but the thing is I paid for a new copy. The Walmart website certainly gave me the impression that I was paying for a new copy.
Meanwhile it had also taken an excruciatingly long time for Volume 1 of the series to arrive, and that was one of the three volumes I had ordered from B&N. I don't know what the hell the delay was about. Well, most of these books came out a fairly long time ago (like five years I think), so I can sort of understand why I had so much trouble getting my hands on them. Maybe I would've saved myself a lot of trouble if I had simply downloaded them onto my kindle, but I felt like this was a series that I should have a physical copy of. Either way, I'm certainly never ordering any books from Walmart again.
The other small but negative highlight from this month has to do with the current season of My Adventures With Superman. I don't know how many of you reading have also been watching this Superman "anime", but this current season took a turn that just left a bad taste in my mouth. Of course I do concede that I do dislike the bad turn I'm speaking of partly because it sort of coincided with the short period earlier this month where I was wondering whether I actually still had a job or not. I've made that sort of negative association with T.V. shows before. There's an episode of the original Star Trek that I'll no longer watch because something nasty happened to me the last time I saw it being rerun.
Still, the thing that bugs me about this turn that the current season of My Adventures With Superman has taken is that it's just so unoriginal! I've seen this sort of plot line done before in many other stories, and so far it seems like it's following the formula. And the thing that really gets me is the fact that Season 2 of this series was just so outstanding! I had never before seen such a unique take on one of Superman's arch enemies, Brainiac. To see the series go from doing something so unique to something so unoriginal is just disappointing to say the least.
Well, in spite of all the bad things to happen this month, it hasn't been all bad. I had a job interview last week. Of course I didn't get the job the end, but the interview itself went well. Plus I got a call yesterday for another job interview, which is now set to happen next week. Hopefully that one will pan out.
This month also saw the Switch 2 release of Digimon Story: Time Stranger. I've been wanting to play that game for a while, partly because of two previous games from the series that I had played and partly because I had been hearing a lot of good things about it online. The game does indeed live up to most of its hype, though I do have a few small problems with it. A lot of grinding is required to beat it, for one thing. It also doesn't have much of a postgame... and yet it does.
Towards the end of the game there are a bunch of side quests that suddenly pop up, and while they can be taken on after beating the final boss, one could argue that it's better to do them before that point. This game sort of encourages you to take on the side quests as soon as they pop up because they generally have really good rewards. So what could be classified as postgame technically isn't postgame at all. So the only thing that's truly left to do in the game besides collecting every single Digimon available is to do a New Game Plus, with the option of replaying at higher difficulties. I'm not really enthusiastic about doing that at the moment.
I think that about covers it for this post. Hopefully next month will be better for me, but we'll see how it actually goes. To those of you who read this post all the way to the end, thank you.
