Category: Otaku

New Year’s Resolution?

February 2, 2013

When I returned from Australia, for some reason I started becoming very aware of the piles of stuff that filled my house. Books to be read. Games to be played. Media to be consumed.

When I was young there was so much I wanted but couldn’t have. Now I can have it all, but – especially in the last year – have been accumulating it faster than I can enjoy it. The reasons are varied (work, World of Warcraft, age), but I’ve never purchased anything I didn’t really want to read, watch or play and, by Jove, it was time to do just that!

So, my first ever (?) New Years resolution: Consume more media!

How much am I talking about here? I will preface by saying we all have little ‘to read’, ‘to watch’ and (some of us) ‘to play’ piles. For instance, I know for a fact quite a few of you – SFL, AW, BS – certainly do. But mine had gotten quite large. As in very large. And it’s time to climb them.

I’ll revisit this resolution at the end of this year, but here’s the scope of what I’m tackling. All of this just describes what is in the house right now, not anything I expect to obtain in the next few weeks or months…

Books

That’s the English version of Monster Hunter Illustrations, which came out over a year ago and is jam-packed with all sorts of fascinating MH art. It’s on my pile with two additional japanese MH books including the sequel (!) and a different art book on TCG art. These share a shelf with no less than four additional art books (including Genzoman, Queen’s Blade and the recently released Hyrule Historia Zelda art book). I could probably look through all these in a long afternoon.

But that’s hardly all. There are some 30+ volumes of manga (Bleach, Bakuman amongst others), 16 novels (including some purchased five years ago when a local bookstore went out of business), 2 academic texts (one, on cryptozoology, is almost 800 pages long), about 50 comics and 20 odd magazines. This list doesn’t even include the approximately 100+ gamebooks from a collection of over 200 that I haven’t played through.

How much of this can I read in one year?

Movies and TV

I got the above for Christmas. It’s the long-awaited (by me, for one) second full Ultraman series finally translated into English. And it’s 19 hours long. It sits on a shelf right now next to DVD collections of all 4 series of Lexx (over 40 hours in total) and the first three seasons of the Keroro Gunso TV anime (20+ hours). Add to this list 22 more anime DVDs or Blu-Rays adding to more than 35 hours (including the full series of Claymore) and about another 28 hours of UK TV series collections and 30 more hours of (sometimes untranslated) Japanese or Korean series and I start to wonder realistically how we could watch all this in a single year? I haven’t even considered the movies…

Games

I currently have, unplayed and in most cases still shrinkwrapped:
– 8 PS3 games (including Hyperdimension Neptunia 2 and Resonance Of Fate)
– 6 Nintendo DS games (including Pokemon Conquest and Shepherd’s Crossing 2)
– 17 (!) PSP games, almost all RPGs, many of which look great (including God Eater Burst and Ragnarok Tactics)
– 11 3DS games, many of which were Christmas gifts (including Theatrythym Final Fantasy and Paper Mario Sticker Star)

That’s 42 games on my ‘to play’ list. With some embarrassment I’ll reveal I have already preordered about 6 more online, and yet right now much of my gaming time is spent playing Warcraft. I think I’ll have to be more disciplined 🙂

Will I succeed? Can I possibly consume all this media before getting overrun? Also, will I stop buying more until what I have has been enjoyed? I’ll revisit this post at the end of the year, and it will be interesting to see how effective my resolution has been!

Review: Peter Davison’s Book Of Alien Monsters

January 31, 2013

I recently acquired this fine tome:

If you’re thinking it look familiar, well it should. However this was the first in the series, and therefore one may presume it doesn’t suffer from the sequelitis of its brethren.

Such a thought would however be patently incorrect, for this is yet another book of short stories that fail to impress, engage or leave an impression. In short, a book written for babies by hacks. With no exception the alien monsters in the book are violent, menacing or dangerous and for that reason I imagine this book would be quite a thrill for kids. But the resolutions are so obvious (or worse, telegraphed) and the stories end so abruptly that I was left wishing for the occasional twist or surprise (“Oh? The alien is actually friendly?”)

Many of the nine stories in this book are very similar, with least half having the same setup: colonists on alien planet don’t realize those dumb animals are actually sentient and aggressive aliens. The other half are equally repetitive: alien life form on Earth hides itself from all but children and ends up possessing and/or eating them. In the world of Peter Davison, there are no good aliens!

Here’s a retelling of the core of many of the stories in this book:

Pletrac huddled in the cave, unsure if the branches at the entrance would be enough to hide them. Vorg groaned quietly at his side, his leg probably broken. Pletrac moved the survival blanket up over his head to try to muffle the sound. How could they have ended up like this? The scouts hadn’t said anything about the creatures being intelligent – or even hostile – and the scans had identified them as one of the best food sources on the planet. The first had offered no resistance at all as they approached, large black eyes watching them seemingly mindlessly. Pletrac could still remember the hideous ululations it had made after Vorg electo-lanced it, and how quickly the others had burst up from the water and onto the land, tentacles coiling furiously. They were amphibious! Somehow they had escaped – the aliens probably afraid of the fire – but there were too many of them, and Vorg was badly injured. Now they would wait in this cave until help arrived. Help that didn’t even know yet that they were in danger…
…Outside the cave Kron-pirr waited, biding his time. The injured one would soon die, he knew, and the other would need sleep. When that time came, Glork’fth would surely be avenged!

Writing that gave me more enjoyment than reading the entire book 🙂

Verdict: save your shekels

Rubber Duck

January 12, 2013

It was an early start yesterday, on the 6:41 am train from Broadmeadow to Sydney.

As with my previous three train trips, I saw only a single Kangaroo on the trip. Once again the glimpse was fleeting and I was unable to photograph it. Here’s an artists impression:

I was in Sydney early, and after dropping my stuff at Adams set out for the city. I had an inkling to hit the shops!

I did the usual places – Kinokuniya, QVB, Pitt Street – before heading to Darling Harbour. There was something there I had to see…

It’s a 3-storey tall inflatable duck art installation, which is floated in Darling Harbour for the Sydney Festival. I’m lovin it!

As I got closer to Darling Harbour I began to see signs advertising dugongs at Sydney Aquarium. I’d never seen a dugong, so decided it was worth a look.

The cost was $38, and the first few displays were decidedly underwhelming. I’d been to this aquarium several times before and feared it may have gone off a bit.

My fears were unjustified! The displays are now themed, and it was just that the first set – Australian river fishes – were just a bit drab. As I wandered through the next I was treated to a kelp forest, a sunken ship, a steampunk themed crab and lobster display and a remarkable ray tank:

And then, the dugongs! Seeing them float around happily almost brought a year to my eye 🙂

They have two, a male and female, who have been there for three years. They are two of the only six dugongs (a south pacific relative of the manatee) in captivity in the world. They eat 50 kg of lettuce each a day!

They are in one of the giant walk-through tanks at the aquarium, which are submerged under the water level of the Harbour.

It’s a very peaceful and special way to see the animals.

There is a mural painted on the walls of the ramp leading down to the bottom of the dugong tank. It details one aspect of man’s history with these beasts:

Sailors jump from a ship pursuing a lovely mermaid…

But mermaids don’t exist and it’s a dugong!

But then later on we discover there is a real mermaid after all 🙂

Fancy a real dugong? Well that would be difficult, but the shop sells the next best thing:

There wasn’t a price tag 🙂

Overall the aquarium was spectacular, and I’m very pleased I visited.

Changing tack a bit, the above is ‘Dark Escape 4D’, a new light gun shooter I played (for $4 a go!) The game is in 3D (you wear glasses) and has a moving seat, an air gun that blasts your face and even a pulse sensor in the gun handle that makes the gun fail if you panic! It *is* a scary game (you sit enclosed in a dark room), but it’s a bit slow for my taste.

I wandered over to The Star casino, where I would boggle at the variety of machines and how geared to Chinese Tourists they have become. $10 of my hard earned dollars went – in equal portions – into the paired games Ice Horse and Fire Horse, mostly because I was attracted by the pretty fantasy horses galloping through the videos 🙂

A bit later I visited an Uggs shop in which no employees seemed to speak English. Do you think Chinese tourists buy a lot of Uggs: