One Year of Blogging

In another week or two it will have been a year since I restarted my blog. Which makes now as good a time as any to talk about how it's gone and what I think of the project.

In that time, I've written more than three times as many posts as all of my previous attempts at blogging combined (151 over the past year versus 41 prior to that). The original plan was to write one post a day... anyone that can do basic math can probably tell that didn't last very long, of course. Still, I'm reasonably happy with how things have turned out so far. I set myself a goal like that because I was curious to see how much I liked writing some form of news commentary or review post every day, and "I don't, and would prefer to do it less often than daily" is a perfectly valid result for that experiment.

One of the things I would like to do instead is come up with more series-based posts that I can write in advance, rather than having to find something I consider interesting enough to write about and then actually doing so every day. That's not very easy to do with news commentary unless I'm willing to write about older stories, but I have some ideas for chapter-by-chapter book reviews and some gaming posts that might fit. So I'll be announcing some of those in the next few weeks.

Probably the biggest stress of the whole project is balancing my desire to talk about politics with the fact that I am still in the military and have no desire to damage either the military's reputation or mine with too much partisan rancor. I don't think there's much I can actually do about it until I either stop blogging or stop being in the military, but I do try to keep myself focused on facts and policy rather than the personal attacks that are all too common in political discussions. Worrying about whether I'm actually keeping myself on the right side of the line is still stressful, though.

As always, feedback is appreciated. I don't think there are more than a tiny handful of people that are actually reading this blog, but for those of you that are, thanks.

Game Review: Arcade Spirits, part 2

I did say I was going to be coming back to this one. I’m quite a bit late (two months, given that I’d intended to get to this on launch weekend), but real life does have a way of interfering with those sorts of plans, so I’m not too disappointed about that.

That and it’s hard to feel unhappy about anything when this game has done an incredible job of living up to the high expectations I had for it. Arcade Spirits has been memorable in a way that all too few of my visual novels have managed - going all the way back to the old Key/Visual Arts games that brought me into this medium. At its best, this medium allows for some very powerful, moving stories with the sort of player interaction that’s difficult in other mediums but without the distraction that more involved gameplay can be. This game lives up to that ideal and then some; even some of the clichés the story uses merely add to the charm.

I’ll put more details below for anyone that wants to read in detail what I did and didn’t like about the story, but since that will involve some serious spoilers, I’ll put my summary here so that everyone can read it: Whether or not you like visual novels, I highly recommend you try this one. I can’t promise it will resonate with you the same way it did for me, but it's still good enough to be worth a shot.

Book Journal: Astra Lost in Space

One of the reasons I enjoy going to physical bookstores (even after getting a tablet with an e-reader app that I like using a lot) is that it's very easy for me to just randomly find interesting books by wandering through the store. Which is exactly how I found Astra; I decided to pick up one of the random space-themed manga I saw in a Japanese bookstore a while back, and then realized I needed to get the rest of the series after I had time to read it.

It starts out as a very nice survival story - the main characters are thrown into deep space after a routine camping trip to another planet goes badly, and they have to come up with a clever plan to survive and get back home. In the process, they have to explore several planets - and as the story develops, the whole thing turns into more of a mystery story featuring not just the characters on the ship itself but the entire world they live in.

Which in many cases is a recipe for disaster. Transitions like that can be hard to pull off without disappointing either the people who liked the first genre or people who liked the second. In this case, though, I thought it was very skillfully done; the end result is a satisfying mystery with some very interesting twists that also manages to be a serious survival tale.

I also think the (relatively short) length deserves a note - because while I do like franchises that keep giving me more of the characters I've come to love, short stories that make their point and call it a day deserve credit too.

I really liked reading this one, and I highly recommend it to any science fiction fans.

Learning from Immigration History

This article from the New York Times stuck with me mostly because of one particular line near the end:

During World War II, the United States blocked a ship with hundreds of Jewish refugees from docking at our shores, sending many back to their deaths. After the war, the United States declared “never again” and became a leader in the modern-day refugee movement.

Given that the whole article is about problems in Central America and Honduras specifically, one can probably guess why the author brings that point up.

And the reason why it's so compelling to me is that this isn't the first time this point has been raised - the immigration debate often features comparisons to the Irish, the Chinese, the Japanese, the Jews, and more, depending on whether we're talking about people who we feared weren't useful, people who we feared might be a threat, or people who we regretted not helping more when we had the chance. It's remarkable how often we've regretted our past mistakes in this regard, and kind of depressing how often we turn around and do the same thing to different groups of people anyway.

That doesn't mean we can't decide we don't wish to or don't believe we can help, and there are plenty of ways we can make the problem worse with poorly thought out interventions. However, using that as an excuse to do nothing at all to help is little more than a prelude to yet more useless avoidable regret.

Game Review: Momodora: Reverie under the Moonlight

While using speed runs to help find games I might like playing is an excellent idea, I really need to stop also using those speed runs as tutorials... particularly when I'm still on my first run through the game. Trying to pull off advanced tricks when I'm still working on basic mechanics makes things a bit more difficult than they really need to be.

... Then again, I managed to reach the true ending of Momodora: Reverie under the Moonlight in something like 4 hours of gameplay, so I guess it wasn't quite as much of a problem as it could have been.

My experience doesn't quite feel normal - to the extent where I hesitate to even call this a review - since I already knew much of what I was going to be facing from the beginning. It was challenging enough to be satisfying, but really wasn't all that difficult in the end even with me spending time trying to kill each of the bosses without taking a hit. I suppose I did have the difficulty turned down fairly low, and I am certainly looking forward to trying it again on a higher setting eventually. The story was a bit predictable but still compelling enough to get by.

Also: You're playing as a priestess who uses a leaf and a bow as weapons and eventually gains the ability to turn into a cat in order to get through smaller spaces. The anime nerd in me says that's worth a lot of points right there.

Overall, I enjoyed it, and I definitely think it's worth playing, but it's a bit short and (at least at normal difficulty) not quite as challenging as I might have hoped for.

End of a Irrelevant Narrative

So I'm going to go ahead and join the debate about the special counsel's investigation and whether or not President Trump's campaign colluded with Russia. I've specifically avoided saying anything one way or the other up to this point, but now that the investigation's ended, I'm more willing to participate briefly.

To put it simply, I really don't care that the special counsel's investigation has ended with no evidence of collusion. It's not going to have all that much of an impact on who I support or vote for in the future.

I made a post on one of my social media accounts shortly after the election that pointed out the various policy disagreements I have with President Trump and the Republican party generally. None of that has changed; to the extent that I've discovered I was wrong about some of those concerns, it's largely a matter of overestimating the risks involved, not underestimating the benefits.

To put it another way, it's similar to the remarks former Senator Flake made when he was asked why he didn't do more to oppose President Trump. He pointed out that he was still a Republican, he still liked lower taxes and fewer regulations, and he wasn't going to oppose such things just because someone he disliked was supporting them. By the same token, I'm not going to stop supporting social justice, strong environmental regulations, and a government that's actually involved in public life to a useful degree simply because some of my compatriots were overly aggressive in assuming criminal behavior on the part of someone they disliked.

And I also feel compelled to point out that President Trump was the most unpopular presidential candidate in history well before the special counsel investigation was even being considered. Those of you who are assuming that this result means President Trump can now cruise to an easy re-election may want to reconsider that assumption. I don't know whether or not he will be re-elected, but I'm fairly confident it will be a rather close race.

Book Journal: Overlord series

One of my friends recommended the Overlord anime to me a while back, and while I still haven't had the time or the Internet reliability to actually watch that yet, it was enough reason to start picking up the English version of the light novel series when I saw it in a bookstore.

As is often the case when someone goes to the trouble to recommend something to me, I've ended up wishing I'd picked it up sooner, because I've enjoyed reading it quite a bit.

The series is about a former online MMO player who decides to stay logged in to his favorite game until he's forced out by its final shutdown, only to discover that instead of being forcibly logged out, he's been thrown into a fantasy alternate world instead. Of course, he soon discovers that his massively powerful character is significantly more powerful than almost anyone else he can find, and the massive dungeon and NPCs that his guild created ended up in this new world with him, so he's a little bit better off than the typical protagonist of these stories, to say the least.

If there is a problem, it's that the story is a bit one-dimensional so far. The main character and his minons are so much stronger than everyone else that most of the stories focus on revealing more of the world's back story or detailing the exact ways in which they manage to annihilate whoever is making trouble for them. Which isn't so bad, since I do enjoy reading these absurdly destructive fantasy-style fights, but it would be nice if there was an actual threat or challenge to the main characters at some point. (Of course, I'm only about halfway through what's currently been published right now, so there's time left for me to get my wish.)