Time – Page 41 – Robot Claw

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!

Panic In Detroit

January 16, 2013

I’m stuck in Detroit due to a flight control computer systems crash. No idea when I’ll leave.

I watched Tangled on the international flight. Thoughts of Rapunzels cute face are all that’s keeping me going right now!

The Dungeons Of Our Youth

January 9, 2013

Today I set out early on an odyssey. I planned to walk to Charlestown, have lunch, then find my way home via circuitous means.

As I do every trip, I wanted to walk the Fernleigh Track. I got an early start, and walked the couple of kilometers from here to the start of the track. The temperature had dropped significantly today, but was still about 30 C, and I was quickly very sweaty.

I’m still a bit croaky in the AM from my cold, and discovered that humming seemed to help. This led to singing, out loud, the song Planet Earth as I strolled through Adamstown. Since I wasn’t sure of the words, I had to make them up:

“Look now, look all around,
there’s no sign of life.
What they said and how they sound,
I can’t hear them now…

The track itself was as quiet as I’ve ever seen it, probably because of yesterday. I saw only a couple of cyclists as I headed to Kahibah, and this meant the birds and lizards were quite active.

That cockatoo was holding a sprig of gumnuts in his left foot. He was quite interested in me, dancing and bobbing on his branch as I walked below. A bit later on the track I saw, from a distance, a large lizard (a monitor, I think) walk across the path. He was gone before I got the camera ready, so here is an artists impression:

I left the track at Burwood road. My original intention was to deviate onto a bush walk which would come out near one of our old homes, but the only path I found was overgrown and quickly petered out.

So I walked through the streets of Kahibah. We used to live in this suburb, and there was much nostalgia as I explored the familiar landmarks. At the end of Murrakin Street (where we once lived) I found a better path leading into the woods:

These are the paths we used to walk as kids! It’s now part of ‘The Great North Walk’, but it’s essentially identical to 20 years ago. It was a pleasant breezy walk through the bush, although if you’re bothered by flies you may have been a bit uncomfortable!

I was a bit surprised to see the path continue into ‘the quarry’ (and yes, I’m using specific language in this post that probably only me and Bernard will understand). This was mostly new, and in parts nicely made:

A little bit later, a right turn, a walk through a wide open gate and I was (surprisingly) inside my primary school, Saint Joseph’s Of Charlestown! Here’s a shot for Bernard:

Charlestown Public pool was a place of many firsts. First Pac-Man, first Xevious, first Centipede, first Galaga. It looks much smaller than it did when I was half my height:

Pacific Highway Charlestown held many firsts of its own – Exedexes, Ghosts’n’Goblins, Kung-Fu Master – all in the cramped quarters of two long-gone fish and chip shops. The area is now dominated by the truly massive Charlestown Square mall, and most of the shops around the mall have closed. Once again, so many memories (Snow Brothers, Pang, Street Fighter 2) come from this area.

Having been walking for over two hours I was hungry when I reached the square, and enjoyed this ambrosial lunch:

Not surprised, are you?

What about this then: the pet store was well stocked with ‘Mexican Walking Fish’ of all colours. I found this guy quite charming:

The Square has an arcade now, under the food court. It was very busy, and mostly ticket redemption and driving games. Amusingly it’s still called Timezone, like that arcade of 1989 that was also in the Square and holds so many fond memories such as Black Dragon, Narc and Thunder Force. Today I played only pinball machines: Transformers and AC/DC.

Then it was the 100 bus to Mayfield to check the used book stores. I once caught the same bus to University back in 1990-3, so again it was nostalgic. The bus was mostly empty today, and the trip went quickly. Newcastle University is almost unrecognizable to me now.

If I were to use two words to describe Mayfield they would be ‘age’ and ‘graffiti’. At least the stencils are still impressive:

Good to see Sonic The Hedgehog is anti-fracking, as its called in the US.

The bookstores yielded nothing, so I meandered on, pausing briefly to make a note of an event I’ll sadly miss since I’ll be back in the US:

Before I left Mayfield I also stopped into an arcade game store. Why isn’t there one of these in Albany?

It was mid afternoon now. I’d been out for hours, spending over five of them walking in the sun. I was still over an hour from home when I snapped this shot:

I look miserable but it was, in truth, a great day. I’ve got another epic stroll planned for Friday. Lets hope it’s as successful.