Just a young bad kid wasn't meant to be shit,
I did things I wish I didn't, I got things I wish I did.
Apologies for being out for a few months, I've been at a loss for words. For the past month I've been unemployed of my own volition- I'm moving again soon. Throughout the month I accumulated a pathetic record of 3 hangovers from 3 separate binges. A consolation rests in that only one of those benders was spent alone. I'd like to say it was a productive month, that I accomplished a lot and did all the reading I wanted, but truthfully I only drowned away what little momentum I had in bubbly gold. Yet, there's still much I've done and priorities I've rearranged.
At the beginning of March I decided to revisit a game that I played during my childhood, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. As an aside, I'm of the opinion that playing as Female Revan is superior and that Drew Karpyshyn is a sexist cretin incapable of writing female characters that aren't either swamp hags or temptresses. There is nothing in between. But- the game was exactly as worthwhile as I remember it. Kashyyyk was overall the only weak point, the rest of the planets were wonderful to revisit, especially Korriban. Piloting the Ebon Hawk with Carth Onasi once again was an honor. Korriban and Taris are still my favorite sections of the game, but Tatooine and Manaan are great as well. Dantooine was as serene as ever, the earlier planets in the game feel as familiar and fresh to me as thoughts of old neighborhoods I used to live in. There's always a little bit of a surprise when you go back to a piece of media that you remember from childhood and realize that it's much shorter than you noticed at the time. Hopefully I'll have more to say about the game after I play it a couple more times, it's a BioWare RPG so it's the kind of game I tend to replay incessantly.
At the tail end of March I started to reread the manga adaptation of Welcome to the NHK, which start as a light novel and was then adapted into a manga and then finally an anime, which is one of my personal favorites. The story is about an unemployed, depressed hikikomori by the name of Tatsuhiro Sato and his struggles with breaking out of the NEET life. I first saw the anime when I was in high school and it clicked with me immediately, it's a show I tend to periodically rewatch as my life ebbs and flows around my own mental health issues. The anime adaptation only covers about half of the manga and after reading it twice I've decided that it'll be a periodic reread as well. Maybe it's the change in living situation, but I've decided that I'm going to read more manga from now on. I started trying to read Junji Ito's adaptation of No Longer Human but only the first volume is currently available online, so if I want to finish it I'll have to go to the bookstore and pay for a physical copy. I already made a neat little list of all the manga I want to try to read this year when I get the chance, Berserk and Akira are currently sitting at the top of the list. At some point I think I'll write about some of my favorite chapters from Welcome to the NHK on my website, not necessarily a review of the whole thing but an overview of which chapters resonate with me and why.
Around that time I discovered another video game that I became obsessed with for a few days, the short indie horror game Iron Lung which has you operating a welded shut submarine to take photos at the floor of a mysterious blood ocean. The emotional weight of having to tell my family member that I'm moving out fit nicely with the claustraphobic intensity of sitting in that submarine at challenger deep with only a grainy window to the outside world in all of its horror and beauty. It's as if my bedroom was the submarine.
I don't know what the fuck I'm doing anymore.