Ta-metru_defender

Yeah, I need this.

That's a dope little easter egg.

You say coffee but your blog post reads like something else.

My lease ends at the end of May and I'm moving. It's part price, part the mouse hunt of the past couple months, part the six floor walkup, part the uneven floors, part the lack of a sick in the kitchen, part the price, part the fact that my bedroom door doesn't really close properly anymore, and part the price. I'm gonna miss the fire escape and the roof and the location and the apartment, though. But Mata freaking Nui apartment hunting in New York is rough. I mean, probably not if you have a poopload of money, but I have no massive wealth, being an underemployed recent grad. Listings are a pain and NO ONE HAS ANY FREAKING FLOORPLANS so we've gotta hoof it out there to investigate. asdfghjkl;

If y'all keep this up Imma start writing Purple/Kelotu fan-fiction.

That's really dope. I half expected the camera to settle behind him and for the game to begin when you had that pull out and pivot at the end, haha.

That fight is in all honesty one of my favorites in all the Star Wars movies, up there with Vader vs Luke in ESB and Rey vs Kylo in TFA. Unlike the ones in AoTC and ESPECIALY RoTS, it doesn't cut away so you can see the actual fight. Never mind that they aren't swinging at each other, it's energetic, a sort of testing each other that we see in Ben vs Vader. But seriously, the bit between Obi-Wan and Maul right after the gate goes down may be the best 30s of lightsabering in Star Wars. /rant

Huh. I should go, shouldn't I?

The PS3 had an incredible selection of incredible games, I'm giving that the edge. Or a Ms. Pac-Man cabinet.

Le-koro uses jungle power. Duh.

We could give Ko-Koro solar power, because ice and solar panel stuff?

I would, actually. I don't log in on mobile because I don't like web browsing on mobile in general, so it'd be handy.

Finally, something I want a Buildable Figure of.

I really enjoyed Season 1 even if the pacing was a little slow. Been meaning to watch Season 2, glad to hear it's dope.

Essays, Not Rants! 265: Book Listening I’ve been a huge Trevor Noah fan since he showed up on Jon Stewart’s Daily Show and started ragging on misconceptions of contemporary Africa by comparing it to the rural US. I found his stand-up special, African American, on Netflix and was delighted to hear him cracking jokes about growing up mixed. Though mine was in no way identical, there was enough familiarity there to really connect. Also, he’s funny. So I was one of the five people who was really keen on him taking over The Daily Show and I also got a chance to see him live last fall in New York when he taped his new special. Point is, I’m a big fan of Trevor Noah. So when his book, Born A Crime, was available for free on Audible, I got audible and the free book. And by book I mean audio book. A book you listen to. Not read. As was made plenty clear last week, I have Many Feelings about the Physicality of Books. I got a hold of the audio book because it was ~free~ with the intention of probably intentionally buying the physical version to actually read. Because who has time to listen to a book? When I read I like having my full attention on said reading. If I’m listening to music it’s gonna be instrumental (Current favorite: The Transistor soundtrack). I’m the sort who gets distracted easily and can end up reading a page and a half before realizing I was thinking about what to cook for dinner. So listening seems counterintuitive. A little too easy to get distracted. That said, I did end up listening to a couple hours of Born A Crime while on a long car ride. It’s a great listen, and as a perk it’s narrated by Noah himself and so rife with accents and proper pronunciation of the Xhosa names. It’s a charming listen, and I don’t really feel like I’m missing out on anything I would from reading. Except for the whole bookiness thing. Look, I like turning pages. I like glancing back. But one thing that Audible does that I really like is that I can bookmark chunks and write notes down. Well, type notes up. So I can take the recording back to the place where he discusses how his grandmother saw him as being white growing up or how he used language as a kid to jump between social spheres at school. It’s neat, to be sure. That said, one thing that’s nice-but-daunting is that it clearly says how long each chapter will take you. I’m gearing up to start the next one, but it’s gonna take twenty-two minutes and I don’t know that I have twenty-two minutes. Sure, I could break it up; listen to ten minutes now and twelve later, but it feels like I’m interrupting his train of thought. More so than a book 'cuz I can’t skim the past couple of pages. I can rewind back a minute or so, but I can’t skim. But I can now consume a book while doing something else, like playing video games. Which is how I usually watch The Daily Show or stand-up anyway. So not all bad – but Born A Crime is a pretty meaty book in some parts, so, again, full attention is better. But hard. Because I’m sitting around doing nothing. Now, Born A Crime is a bit of an oddity, in that it’s read by Trevor Noah, a person known for talking. Where most audio books are read by someone who’s not the writer, with this we get to actually hear it 'as intended.' So does that make it truer to its ideal than the written version? I’m not sure. I lean towards the understanding that if something is presented one way, it is intended to be seen that way. Movie scripts are great and all, but they’re supposed to be movies. A stand-up special doesn’t work as well on the page, for obvious reasons. So does a work that’s meant to be read work as spoken word? Especially if it’s spoken by the dude who wrote it? I don’t know. I do know that I’m enjoying the book, but I wonder if I’d enjoy it more read. I do know that I will be picking up a physical copy eventually to reread and annotate. Will I listen to another book down the line? Hard to say, 'cuz half the reason I like reading is, well, the reading part.

If you are referring to the odd cross between a star destroyer and a TIE, then I believe that has appeared in the X-Wing miniatures line previously. You'll notice that those are not made of LEGO. =P

Screw that, Fisherman's Friend is where it's at.

Omg, yeah. That's one thing that bugs me about reading all my comics digitally – I lose the original spacing for the pages. Plus there are some books with footnotes and endnotes galore that I won't wanna give up on. Also, old book smell. I bought a bunch of used books from The Strand and they smell so good.

But have you put it underwater?

I want that ship from Battlefront II. I also want X-Wings and U-Wings and TIE/d's.

Essays, Not Rants! 264: Page Feel I read a lot. This is partly a byproduct of having grown up a bookworm and partly having taken a course of studied that meant a lot of reading. Like a lot a lot. Since graduating, I’ve kept it up best I can and I’m sitting at fifteen-odd books in the past eleven months. Like I said, reading a lot. A side effect of this is that I have a wonderful bookshelf. You’ve got Ulysses there and the first volume of Saga there with CS Lewis’ Of Other Worlds. I like it, in part because it’s an egotistical testament to All The Books. I mean, it’s kinda why I had a BluRay collection for a while. I love special features and stuff, but there’s also the fun of being able to tell a lot about a person based on what movies, games, books, music they own. But I’ve slowly been relying more on Netflix, etc for movies and tv with only really special things (Star Wars) getting bought. So books is the thing on my shelves. And I’m moving in a couple months, which means packing everything up and hauling it down six(!) flights of stairs and to wherever I’m off to next. Which means packing up All The Books. And carrying All The Books elsewhere. Which then begs the question: Why the heck don’t I have a Kindle? It’s light, I can fit All The Books inside and would make things so much easier. Also, once the thing is paid for, arguably cheaper. So there’s no real cons. But the bookshelf. And the books. I like writing in my books. My copy of Ulysses is covered in my scrawls. Some books only have the occasional comment or underline. The Chinese in America has a lot of notes in the margins. Sure, you can do that on a Kindle and typed notes is easier to read than my handwriting, but there’s the process. Pen on paper. Flicking through a book looking for those notes. The feel of the pages. There’s the bookshelf too. Maybe it’s an egotistical thing where I like having a monument to All The Books I Have Read in my apartment and to make sure people visiting can see All The Books. It’s a way for me to tell any visitor that I have a diverse array of interests (why yes, that is Mark Mazzetti’s study of the CIA, The Way of The Knife, next to Ready Player One, behold for I am cultured). It means that when some friends and I are a few drinks deep and talking about 80s movies or Ulysses I can pull a book off my monument to All The Books I Have Read and point to a passage relevant to our discussions. Like I said, it’s egotistical, but it has a purpose. But maybe that egotism has a deeper root in a declaration of identity. Books are, to an extent, more personal than, say, movies. You don’t just go read a book at random, usually. Bookshelves represent what you’re into and what you’re enjoy, what you’ve studied and what you read for pleasure. They work as a summation of your interests and are thus reflexive back on you as a person. If you’re someone with The New Bloomsday Book you take reading important books seriously, but The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy lets everyone know you know how to have fun. By curating a bookshelf, you’re displaying a facet of yourself. You don’t get that on a Kindle. I think that’s something that we lose when we go digital. Sure, it’s a bit of a luddite’s perspective, but I like recognizing a book a stranger’s reading on the subway or having an immediate icebreaker when you recognize a book on someone’s shelf. So will I get a Kindle? Maybe. Probably eventually. Let’s see just how much I complain about lugging these books to a new apartment.

See, cash grab? I appreciate Nomura's shade — heck, years between KH2 and now are a running joke at this point — but I do think the impatience is a valid point.

All that's really important for a 300 year gap is that Purple fathers the majority of the next-generation of Okotoan rulers. Kelotu god-fathers/babysits.

That's I think what harms the franchise. It's parceled out, sure, but it becomes much harder to just be kinda into the games. Had they called 3D just 3, I'd be somewhat more forgiving, especially if they scaled it up to a full release. It feels like breadcrumbs, especially in the past buncha years, where it's like "Here's this, until you get the real thing."

So remember that movie I was making last year? We mixed on Wednesday and I've uploaded it now. Time to submit to festivals and stuff. It's DONE. DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE. I feel like a new mother except I don't want to see my newborn right now because the thing's been gestating for the last eighteen months and geez.