hey

[himecatherine]

Vanilla WoW - Further Discussion

The other day, I was talking to my friend Tyler, and it was the first time I was ever able to properly explain why Vanilla World of Warcraft was so loved by so many people over current installments of the game.

Everything relied on reputation. You couldn’t do too much within World of Warcraft without reputation because you were forced to play with the people on your server only, whereas now, you can queue in LFR or Dungeon Finder and get a group for a dungeon or raid very quickly and easily, without ever having to know anyone in your raid. It removed the social aspect from an MMORPG.

When you leveled, you giving someone a heal or grouping up with them to help them with a quest when you already finished it was something that that person would remember, and maybe that person will hit 60 and become the Raid Leader of a big guild on your server and scratch your back for that favor. Whenever you grouped up with someone for a PUG 5 man dungeon, and you performed well and were nice and sociable, they’d remember you later and maybe invite you to their sick Warsong Gulch premade group and help you farm honor. 

In short, if you wanted to constantly be involved in group activities within the game, which is where the most fun happens, you had to have a good reputation, or get a good rep, because it would increase the likelihood of people wanting to be around you and play with you. Current WoW eliminates the need for having good rep because if you don’t want to talk to anyone, you don’t have to, and now we have entire servers of people who have never had to truly interact with each other, which eliminates the need to have an MMORPG in the first place.

[himecatherine]

Vanilla World of Warcraft

So, I started to play on Kronos, a vanilla WoW private server with my friends, and so far, I’m loving the shit out of it.

Vanilla WoW, as I’ve mentioned before, is something very special to me. It was my first online gaming experience, where I met my first real girlfriend, where I met my best friends who I still hang out with today, and much more.

WoW kind of taught me how to talk to people, because it thrust me into this environment that was so different from the one I knew, which was a Christian household with a Christian private school, and allowed me to speak with people in this new environment and opened me up to all sorts of people and new ideas. 

It also was my main outlet for depression whenever my grandma died, and now continues to be a method of relaxation for my friends and I. 

Part of what was so nice about it compared to WoW right now, is that every green means something. Nothing is useless, because it can be sold on the auction house, or disenchanted and the materials can be used in something or sold off for some cash. 

There’s also a nice amount of familiar bugs. Not properly leaving combat, falling through the earth in random spots, Stealth breaking, etc. It’s all part of the beautiful nostalgic experience of bugs that were accepted in an MMO made in 2004. 

Another thing that’s unique to vanilla WoW, is reputation. You can’t just use Group or Raid Finder to get a group for a dungeon or raid, so, you need to have a decent reputation in order to get a group, and even moreso get into a guild. If you ninja items regularly, or are a dickhead, then word will get around and people will just not want to group up or do anything with you.

To sum it all up, vanilla WoW has flaws like having too many skills, having dumb bugs, and also not having a proper form of organized PvP, etc, but it still has a very strong sense of danger that WoW does not. Everything is hard in some way, shape, or form, and the rewards for doing those hard things are always extremely valuable, no matter how small an upgrade or amount of gold it is, and this is something that I think was taken very much for granted.

Thank you all so much for reading, and I hope to see you all next week. Take care! 

[himecatherine]

Finals and Vanilla WoW feels

Sorry I’ve missed almost three weeks. I’ll be writing an entry on Friday as well, and I’ll be much more consistent in the coming months as it’s summer break for me now. 

I’m finally done with uni finals, which is fucking awesome, because I hate school and now I’m one step closer to being done with it forever. I even got to skip one of my finals, which is amazing. The only thing I now need to worry about for next semester is registering for my CLEP test so I can skip my a Spanish course or two.

Besides that, this summer I’ll be writing a lot more for Tacotaku than I have been, doing videos with the twins on our YouTube channel, and playing a lot of WoW on a Vanilla private server my friends and I found called Kronos. If you miss it at all, you should check it out, because so far it’s fucking unreal.

I didn’t think I’d ever get a chance to play Vanilla ever again, as I didn’t even know private servers for it existed, and I didn’t play on Nostralius when that was up, so Kronos is the next best thing for me. Playing Vanilla WoW, especially with friends, is one of the most gratifying things in the world for me. I’ll write more about this on Thursday, but I just wanted to get this out there. Thanks for the read, and I hope you all are having a wonderful week. Take care!

[moonsugarstarq]

SHAWN WASABI HAS HAD HIS MIDI FIGHTER + MACBOOK STOLEN IN SAN FRANCISCO

Shawn Wasabi, someone I am very privileged to call my friend, has been tweeting tonight that his car got broken into and his one-of-a-kind Midi Fighter 64 was stolen from it, along with his macbook and backup harddrive. The Midi Fighter is this cool launchpad he plays.

The police are refusing to do anything about it, because his eyes were red (from crying) and they decided he and his friends had been smoking. They won’t even let him file a report.

Please, please keep your eyes peeled for his Midi Fighter. It is the only one of its kind in the world. That Midi is his entire musical life and he’s devastated that it got stolen. If you know or see ANYTHING, PLEASE contact the San Francisco police.

I’m so angry. He is a wonderful person and did not deserve this.

[lavenderharmony-deactivated2025]

PLEASE REBLOG THIS

IF YOURE IN SF OR/AND HAVE ANY INFO

[email protected]

Please signal boost this

[paperbloghouse-deactivated20200]

PLEASE SAN FRAN FOLKS PLEASE KEEP A EYE OUT FOR MY FRIEND SHAWN

[himecatherine]

Racial Blindness

This was inspired by an English lecture I had this last week regarding racial blindness, and what it’s as bad as racism, and even though I was able to talk about it in that classroom, I’d also like to talk about it here.

Racial blindness is as cancerous as racism because it makes you blind to the root of certain issues regarding race. One big example is gentrification.

For those of you who may not know, gentrification is the process of lowering the property value of a neighborhood, buying it at the reduced price, and then reselling it at a higher price after some cleaning up has been done. An easy way to tell if this is happening to a poorer neighborhood is if there is a liquor and gun store every other corner or so; realtors are trying to make that neighborhoods’ inhabitants kill each other. 

Now, when a racially blind person looks at this issue, and then looks at the people that this mostly happens to: those living in African American communities, they will disregard the race factor and see it not as a prejudice against blacks, but rather, an issue of poverty, despite it happening to blacks at a disproportionate rate compared to other ethnicities. 

This same issue can be applied to drugs. Black men have been proven to consume a similar amount of illegal substances as whites are, and yet, are arrested much more for them. A racially blind person will look at this and think of it as an issue with either our youth’s desire to escape, or an issue of drug culture rather than seeing it as systematic racism within our police force. 

At the end of the day, it is unfair to everyone to turn a blind eye to race, for good or bad. We should not be so scared of being labeled as insensitive when referring to other’s racial or ethnic identities that we completely ignore it or pretend it’s not there. We should just accept it, along with everything else around us, and try to make the most of it.

[himecatherine]

Male Body Image Disorders: A Response

Originally I was going to talk about Resident Evil 4, as I recently purchased it again for the second time in my life, this time on PC, and at the time of writing I’ve pumped 45 hours into the game, but I’ve decided against it after watching this video by Vegan Gains today.

In case you don’t want to watch the video, Richard (Vegan Gains) talks about the double standard regarding body image disorders, and how it’s effect on women is always discussed in the media, but not for males, and how just like girls are influenced by the media to have certain unrealistic ideas of beauty, men are influenced by the media in the same way. I agree completely, up until he mentions anime and manga, and how they may have a contributing factor to this problem, which I disagree with, to an extent.

Before we dive into this, allow me to dispel the myth that because men are privileged, they cannot feel pain the same way that others can, and therefore have no room to complain. Male anorexia is a very real thing and according to the National Eating Disorders website, 10 million men in the United States (about 13% of all males in the country) will suffer a clinically significant eating disorder sometime in their lives. 

All right, so the reason why I disagree with Vegan Gains on his anime point, is because, I feel that although a piece media may have an influence on you, it cannot make a person take action. A good example of this, since we’re talking about Japanese animation, is lolicon and shota media and its correlation to child abuse. Japan, up until about 2 summers ago, did not make the possession of child pornography illegal. And on top of being the world’s biggest manufacturer of lolicon and shota doujinshi, manga, hentai, and video games, they’re not a country of raving pedophiles. In fact, in 2012, Japan reported 13,000 children were abused, which is about .10% of the total population. Now, in the U.S., where child pornography has been illegal for a very long time, and make no materials whatsoever depicting children in compromising situations, in 2012 reported almost 690,000 cases of child abuse, which would make up about .21% of the population, double the rate of abuse in Japan!

Now, men want to look like and emulate the guys they see in media, and for them that means: hours in the gym on top of dieting to get low body fat to show off their muscles, steroid use because a lot of cartoon and Hollywood bodies cannot be achieved naturally for most people even after years of training and diet, and tanned bodies, which means a lot of time in tanning salons as the majority of males in this country are pasty. The reason for this is because these men they idolize represent not only power and bravery, as shown in Terminator and other action films, but also sexual appeal and good social skills, as portrayed in James Bond and Jason Statham 

Even though anime like First of the North Star, Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, and Dragonball may have have a slight influence on young men to want to look like the characters portrayed in each of these shows, I do not feel that they are lead contributors to any feelings of form of body image issues. And, let’s mix it up a bit, even if they did, and one wanted to use these shows as reference, there are plenty of popular anime that portray males as being lean, like Yusuke from Yu Yu Hakusho and Inuyasha from Inuyasha, and if we look at modern day anime marketed towards young men, we can find so many more examples of this. 

The reason I’m so passionate about addressing this, is because this train of thought does not give any meaningful rhetoric towards solving issues, like child abuse or body image issues, and in fact, is harmful because it takes away from the what truly need to be done in order to begin to address these issues, like promoting HEALTHY looking bodies, rather than all lean or all muscly, or promoting discussion of mental issues that might lead one to want to violate or commit violence against a child, so that treatment may be provided in a calm, sensible manner.

Thanks as always for reading, and see you next week.

[himecatherine]

Weight Loss Supplements

I hate weight loss supplements. They have been proven to have speed-like qualities in them, and a lot of these supplements are marketed towards older women, like my mom, who almost fell for the shitty marketing and took them until I told her about it.

I’ve always known that those sort of things didn’t help, and that the only efficient way to lose weight is by counting calories along with proper diet and exercise, but, only a few years ago, after looking through some research material for weight training, did I find a section that discussed these supplements, and how they are dangerous for you, especially if you have an untrained heart, as they force your heart to work at a higher BPM for a certain amount of time to make you sweat, which causes weight loss, but also the deterioration of your body.

Another thing that created my hatred for these supplements, is the film Requiem for a Dream, which details the lives of 4 New Yorker’s living with drug addiction. Now, in this film, the main character’s mother is addicted to diet pills, which, unbeknownst to her, is speed. As I watched this film, and saw her health deteriorate, I immediately thought of my own mother, and how she, at the time, was considering taking these sorts of pills after they were recommended to her by my aunts. As soon as I finished the film, I begged her not to, showed her the evidence for it, and thankfully, she has not taken any.

It still just fucks me up to think how many people fall for the shitty marketing for these sorts of things. It should be obvious that a pill that just makes you lose weight without you having to do anything is fucking bad for you. Wouldn’t you not want to just look up what these pills contain just out of curiosity? And the shittier thing about it, is that the FDA still will not ban these supplements, despite being proven to be bad for you. It enables bad choices about health to be made, and just costs average, dumb people more money to get heart surgery as well as possibly rehab because they fell for a shady product. 

In the end, I know I just have to try and worry about the people around me, and if I see someone falling for the trap of “get fit quick” shit, then I’ll tell them the facts so hopefully they won’t take whatever magical elixirs back alley ‘doctors’ try to sell them. 

[himecatherine]

Star Wars VII Thoughts

Super late, sorry, but, it was Christmas, so forgive me?

Anyway, I just saw the latest Star Wars last night, and, it was good, but less good than what people were making it out to be. I think that’s why I walked out of the theater with disappointment in my heart. The main thing that was helping me keep my head up regarding the film though, was the fact that this first film is supposed to be introductory. It’s meant to introduce the viewers to the world, and the story that the next two films are going to be centered around. Once I put that fully through my mind, I was fine, and am really stoked for the next films.

It’s not to say that the film was bad though, it was really cool, and I knew that this was going to be introductory, it’s just that, for a week straight, people were hyping up this movie so fucking much, like, that it was the best movie ever. One thing that really made me really annoyed with the film, was how much they were trying to force the relationship between the storm trooper, and the girl. It was seriously so cringy, and fucked my ability to fully enjoy the characters, because I was afraid a piece of dialogue was going to try and further their shallow relationship. 

Aside from that, and also some other small nitpicky things, the movie was great. Amazing camera work, costumes, and special effects (oh my god). That’s all I have to really say about it, though. 

Thank you all very much for reading this. These blogs are a weekly thing I’m going to be doing from now on, I hope you enjoyed this entry, and by chance, if you care to support me financially in this juncture, then I implore you to visit my Patreon where you can help me feed myself, and then eventually move out:https://www.patreon.com/himecatherine

[himecatherine]

Play Asia Lowering DoAX3 Price

According to this article, Play Asia has stood up to the SJW’s who wished for the newest Dead or Alive game to not be released in the West, and against all controversy, were the only sellers who were willing to sell an English version of the game. Their popularity has skyrocketed because of this, and they sold so many copies of the game, that they decided to lower the price from $73, to $60! Of course, they refunded everyone who purchased the game at the increased price, and continue to receive praise as the company who stood up to censorship.

I also really thank goodness that Play Asia did this. I don’t even play Dead or Alive, but, I still respect any and everyone who is willing to stand up to the face of tyranny, especially when it’s in the form of censorship, because I feel that even if I don’t agree with something someone has to say, I’m going to defend their right to say it until the end, because I don’t want for someone else to tell me that I am not allowed to say something. It’s not right, it’s not fair, and it will not lead to a better world, but a world where people are afraid to speak their opinion because they don’t know if the thought police are going to come and take their jobs away. 

This isn’t an exaggeration to say either. Think of Dr. Matt Taylor, and how he was abused by SJW’s everywhere for wearing a shirt that made certain insecure women get buttmad, so much so that he was brought to tears in his apology, that he didn’t even need to make if it weren’t for a group of irrational women who had nothing better to do with their time than be angry at an astrophysicist for wearing a shirt that triggered them. 

The point of me saying all of this, is that there needs to be a foot put down against these radical third-wave feminists who are taking extreme to an entirely different level. Luckily though, it seems as though they have stagnated in their radicalism, so that’s good. If any other games, or any other pieces of media are censored in this way, hopefully the groups trying to censor them will be met with successful backlash the same way that this situation was.

Thank you all very much for reading this. These blogs are a weekly thing I’m going to be doing from now on, I hope you enjoyed this entry, and by chance, if you care to support me financially in this juncture, then I implore you to visit my Patreon where you can help me feed myself, and then eventually move out:https://www.patreon.com/himecatherine

[himecatherine]

Coldrain and Spooky Saturday

Sorry this is late again. I forgot to write up something on Thursday night to prepare before I went to see Coldrain on Friday. But, here it is, and I can talk about Coldrain now!

The Coldrain concert in Fort Worth was amazing. It was in a small, shitty bar, and they weren’t even the headliner, but man, was that the best concert of my life. I got to meet the band that performed the opening to my favorite anime ever, and saw them for their first U.S. tour, according to their family that attended the show. Also, that was another crazy thing; the lead vocalist, Masato, whom I had admired for years, I got to fucking meet his family. It was a crazy and surreal experience. But, yeah, meeting the band, getting their albums and getting them signed by them, my good friend Jake getting me the guitarist’s pick, and meeting Masato’s white family, was all pretty crazy. For anyone who doesn’t know who I’m talking about, Coldrain is a Japanese band who performs songs in English, and they did the opening song for Rainbow, my favorite anime about six boys who must survive the cruelties of juvenile jail in Japan after they lost World War II.

Now, onto the next topic, Spooky Saturday. It’s a new series we’re doing on Anime Freedom Fighters, where we watch videos about creepypasta, horror films, or whatever is just spooky, and we record our reaction to it. We figured we might as well do it since we do this sort of thing together anyway, and there’s nothing quite like it out there on the internet so far, as far as we know, so we might as well do it. So, if you want to help us with it, link us any scary YouTube videos you know of, preferably just creepy ones with few to no jumpscares (but, it’s your submissions, so have at it!), and we will consider watching it and reacting to it on the show. 

Thank you all very much for reading this. These blogs are a weekly thing I’m going to be doing from now on, I hope you enjoyed this entry, and by chance, if you care to support me financially in this juncture, then I implore you to visit my Patreon where you can help me feed myself, and then eventually move out:https://www.patreon.com/himecatherine

[himecatherine]

A Word on Veganism

So right now, I’m 2 months into being a vegan. I don’t remember the date; I’m just guessing the number of weeks, and I think it’s 8, so we’ll stick with two months. I had considered starting to be a vegetarian for a while coming out of high school, because I began to read more into the health benefits of it, but I never made significant effort into converting fully. What I did was slowly ween myself off of meat at first, I told myself “I will limit myself from eating certain types of meat per year, until I no longer allow myself to eat it so I don’t have cravings and go back to it.” I started with red meat; I pretty much stopped eating red meat for a completely, but when I turned 19, I didn’t proceed to cut anything else out due to laziness, so I fucked up there.

What really drove me to quitting meat altogether, was a little help from my friends, Dan and John, by showing me a YouTube fitness channel called Vegan Gains. I fell in love with this guy’s channel from the very start. He had so much information that no other fitness channel I had ever watched talked about, and he ALWAYS cites his claims with medical studies. He’s also a very edgy guy, which I’ve always been the type to gravitate towards because even if they’re totally wrong about something, they still put on a show when they’re being asses, and they never fail to entertain. He showed studies that proved that veganism was not only the cheapest diet possible, but also the most beneficial to people who strength train. 

One thing that people misunderstand, is the main reason for me going vegan. I didn’t choose to go vegan because I care for animals necessarily, because I do, but, I’m mainly in it for the health benefits and cost efficiency. For whatever reason, I let misinformation about the diet enter my mind, and for years I thought that any sort of plant based diet was expensive in the long run because of the amount of supplements that you had to take in order to supplement the loss of vitamins, but the opposite was actually true- vegan diets are the most vitamin efficient. The only exception to this rule though, is the vitamin B12, which you cannot get from a plant based diet because of the way that they are modernly grown. 

My only real complaints about the diet so far, is that it’s hard for me to go to restaurants, and I’m still scared to ask most waiters about a vegan option if there is none listed on the menu, also my family is slightly unsupportive, but that’s changing over time. I’m gonna link Vegan Gains’ channel because I think this guy needs a lot more attention than he’s currently getting: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCr2eKhGzPhN5RPVk5dd5o3g

Thank you all very much for reading this. These blogs are a weekly thing I’m going to be doing from now on, I hope you enjoyed this entry, and by chance, if you care to support me financially in this juncture, then I implore you to visit my Patreon where you can help me feed myself, and then eventually move out:https://www.patreon.com/himecatherine

[himecatherine]

Manga Reading ANN

So right now, the lovely twins put me in charge of deciding which manga we’re going to be reading and reviewing whenever new chapters come out, which is fine with me, because it’s something that I do normally, but it presents its’ own unique problem: Which manga could we all read and enjoy?

If it were up to me, we’d all be reading a few EXTREMELY popular things like To Love Ru, Shokugeki no Souma, etc, but, I know that they would probably get bored of reading every chapter of it up to its current point, and every week reading every chapter with me would feel like a bore, so, I’m trying to put together a list of stuff that we can all read together and review, and enjoy collectively.

I have five in mind, and so far you lot have seen two of them: Tokyo Ghoul and Berserk, and we’ll be watching shows together starting next season, but, I still have issues with figuring out which series’ we’re going to be collectively reading. They have to not only be things that the three of us won’t feel bored/forced into reading, and also they have to be popular to an extent, or else there will be no views on the videos, and also they can’t be series’ that may be ending in the foreseeable future, because by now there are already established names within the review community for those series’, as well as the fact that they can potentially take a very long time to catch up to (Take Bleach and One Piece for example.)

Once our channel gets off the ground, and we all move in together, I might do videos by myself as I know the twins are busy and don’t have time to be reading and watching every new show that’s airing, and just talk about shit that I read that, despite it not being popular, I still enjoy. It’d be much more of a labor of love, than something we all enjoy, but also are doing it with a return of some form in mind, in this case, views.

Happy Thanksgiving, Ameribros. I hope you’re all doing well, and please be safe. Thank you all very much for reading this. These blogs are a weekly thing I’m going to be doing from now on, I hope you enjoyed this entry, and by chance, if you care to support me financially in this juncture, then I implore you to visit my Patreon where you can help me feed myself, and then eventually move out:https://www.patreon.com/himecatherine

[himecatherine]

Anime Freedom Fighters

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCp5NAufbMq2v5ZoiTk9zF5Q/

I’m going to shamelessly make a blog about my new YouTube channel I started with my friends. It’s a toss up of different things, really. We’re going to be talking about anime and manga news, reviews, and ractions, as well as cover extremely relevant topics in the news, and any other ideas we can think of that people might like. Just now I uploaded a video with my friend Jacob talking about his experience working as a Starbucks Barista on a series we call, “Life of a Wagecuck,” and if any of you would like to be on it, and complain about current, or past jobs, then feel free to message me and we can work something out.

This YouTube channel, along with this weekly blog, and Haruhichan and Tacotaku all come together to keep my life busy, and I like it a lot. I think everyone should have form of goal or plan of action to keep themselves busy, because I’ve been meeting a bunch of people lately who were like me, just chilled out most days with not too much they committed themselves to doing, but, instead of it being regenerative and restful to them, it was nightmare fuel; it made them feel like their life was not really happening, and rather was just going by them like a bullet train. 

I’m really happy with where I am right now, I feel a rather crazy sense of purpose because I’m now not only doing my weekly writings for myself and some websites, but I’m now part of an always-active team trying to come up with new ideas and plans to improve. I only hope to be able to pull my weight. 

That’s all I have for now, but please, if you do read up to this point, which, thank you if you did, but it would mean a whole bunch more to me if you clicked the YouTube link, checked out our videos, rate and sub, and if you disliked the videos, tell us why so we can maybe fix them. Take care for now, I hope you are all doing well, and please be safe.

Thank you all very much for reading this. These blogs are a weekly thing I’m going to be doing from now on, I hope you enjoyed this entry, and by chance, if you care to support me financially in this juncture, then I implore you to visit my Patreon where you can help me feed myself, and then eventually move out: https://www.patreon.com/himecatherine

[himecatherine]

Fallout 4 First Impressions

I decided against going to Medium after I realized I have only met three people in my entire life who have ever referenced the site, so I’ll be staying here for a while to come. I’ve been playing a bunch of Fallout 4 recently and want to express my first impressions of it upon you.

I walked into the game thinking that it was going to be the same as Fallout 3 and New Vegas, as the graphics looked very similar, and if the graphics are similar, Bethesda is incapable of having worked on anything else like story, gameplay, etc, right? I’m very glad that I was wrong. 

Fallout 4 started out more engaging than 3 or New Vegas ever did, by immersing me in the world first even if for just a moment, allowing me to taste danger as everything crumbles around me and I barely survive with my family, and then watch my wife lose her life, and watch my son be kidnapped by a mercenary, leaving me as a shell of a human only wanting revenge. So what did I first do when I was free? I explored the world of course. I wanted to see what kind of wasteland Bethesda created for me to fuck around in for the next 80 odd hours. My kidnapped son can wait a little longer, after all, even if the kidnapped was going to kill him, he’d probably glitch into the floor, rendering him incapable of doing anything.

The first thing I noticed was that shit actually takes more than two bullets to kill in this game. They also hurt a lot more. The dog you meet helps against single targets, but just gets wrecked whenever you have to face off against multiple opponents, so he sometimes feels like a Stimpak addict when he should be my partner in crime. 

I elected to be an extremely skinny, extremely weak, sly marksman for my first playthrough, and man, did I make a mistake. 20 hours in and there have been four separate occasions where I lost all of my ammo within the first part of a mission, and had to use the really shitty guns that I picked off the ground, which then forced me to drop a lot of my loot, and sometimes a piece of armor or even one of my own modded guns just so I could finish the quest, and I’m terrified of storing the gun in a barrel or dishwasher because I don’t know if this game has the Skyrim glitch where shit randomly goes to different barrels in the world, or just is gone when you go to collect it later. 

The story is pretty cool so far. I’ve been doing a combination of the Minutemen side missions as well as the main story quests, and it’s all decently written for an open world game where your main focus is just to explore and wreak havoc on this artificial sandbox you’re dropped into. Another great thing is that in this game, like Skyrim, the NPCs don’t awkwardly stare at you whenever they speak to you. They actually move their hands and look away occasionally when speaking, and ask if you’re all right if you don’t respond to them for a while during a dialogue choice. I don’t want to give out any spoilers, so I’ll end it here. Pretty much, this game is harder and more fun than 3 so far. Everyone and their mom will tell you to buy this game, but you should only really listen to them if you really like Sandbox games, as well as Bethesda games because this game, just like all the others, is only really fun when bugs don’t break the game and make it impossible to progress. 

Thank you all very much for reading this. These blogs are a weekly thing I’m going to be doing from now on, I hope you enjoyed this entry, and by chance, if you care to support me financially in this juncture, then I implore you to visit my Patreon where you can help me feed myself, and then eventually move out: https://www.patreon.com/himecatherine

[himecatherine]

Moving to Medium and Tales of Zestiria

I’m considering switching to the website Medium, as it’s focused more towards writing, and also I feel like the people that do follow me on here barely read my shit anyway, so I might have better luck with exposure there, but that’s beside the point. I’ll edit in the link to the Medium account later once I make it in case there are people here who still read my shit, and just don’t comment.

I’ve been playing a lot of Tales of Zestiria recently. I really like the game. It’s cozy and fun, but, it’s nothing spectacular at all. The graphics and music are mediocre, the combat feels kind of boring, aside from successfully landing combos, but even then it’s not too engaging, and the cutscenes look weird because the characters don’t really express themselves physically with their hands, shrug their shoulders, shift their weight or anything. The game’s main saving grace though, is the story, and the character designs.  

Every character’s appearance tells a story about them. Mikael’s very calm, cool, and almost regal attitude is brought out by the very fine clothing that he wears, and the blue represents the fact that he’s a water mage. Sorey’s cheerful and adventurous nature comes out through his windtossed hair, feather earrings and loose clothing. Absolutely everyone has their own distinct style, and it shines through. Whoever drew the original character designs for all of these characters is amazing because they made a game with such bad graphics for 2015, still look good and unique.  

The story, without spoiling anything and please don’t tell me anything too much about it because I haven’t finished it yet, is pretty cool. It’s decently unique, although it takes certain ideas from other Eastern media and forms it into its own, but, it’s still written in a way to where you can tell that the writer may have been inspired by certain other stories, but combined them and wrote them to make them his own unique tale. I’m looking forward to finishing it, but, honestly so far unless the ending is really good, I’m going to have to give this game a 3/5 at most. Check it out if you have $50 to spare on Steam or PS4 or something.

Thank you all very much for reading this. These blogs are a weekly thing I’m going to be doing from now on, I hope you enjoyed this entry, and by chance, if you care to support me financially in this juncture, then I implore you to visit my Patreon where you can help me feed myself, and then eventually move out: https://www.patreon.com/himecatherine 

[himecatherine]

United Nations Discuss Banning Explicit Manga and Games

This blog will be a followup to an article I wrote on Haruhichan this week, regarding the UN’s move on censoring Eastern media. I’m feeling a little ill, and I’m fairly certain passionate about this sort of thing, so please, bear with me. 

I feel like a panel of old men and women should not be allowed to dictate a country’s media, as it will do more harm than good. I feel that it’s fine if the UN thinks that loli and shota hentai manga should be curbed somewhat, but, the UN wants to get rid of anything that they view as sexually explicit. Where is the line drawn? Are they just going to stop at banning hentai manga and doujinshi with toddlers or obvious lolis and shotas? Or, are they going to go further, and ban ecchi anime with high school girls in bikinis? If they do that, they can go even further and ban any anime with any people that are under 18, showing even a little skin? Would something as innocent as Hunter x Hunter get banned because the main character wears short shorts? I don’t feel as though I am being irrational here. The UN is filled with old people who don’t understand proper social context of this generation, and could misinterpret harmless things are disguised smut for pedophiles. Just look at the head of this whole push against Eastern Media, Maud de Boer-Buquicchio. She is a 70 year old woman with probably no true understanding of the medium, or its artistic intent. 

Throughout History, mankind has been shown to make unwise decisions whenever they believe it is OK to begin to censor art, because they feel as though it cannot get out of control. There are pieces of literature dedicated to this very topic that warn us that mankind is not capable of deciding that can, or cannot be viewed, and therefore be able to roll with the times and accept any and all forms of art. If the UN decides to crack down on manga, I feel as though they will do more bad than good, especially because I feel as though one of the first things to go will be one of my favorite manga, Banana Fish. It is a story centered around a child prostitute who one day gets thrown into a government conspiracy way bigger than anything he’s ever been involved with. Part of the story revolves around him being a child prostitute and how he has to carry around the baggage of being an old guys’ plaything, as well as having the underlying narrative which shows how common and bad child prostitution is, and how we need to speak out against it. I don’t think the UN will look into each individual story though, if their laws do pass, and they will just label it as an undesirable piece of art, and block it out, despite the fact that the story advocates for the end of child exploitation. Will GANTZ and Berserk also be banned, because they have child rape inside of them in order to illustrate a plot point, and not to just be pornographic? I’m just scared. As I stated earlier, I have little to no faith that if these laws do pass, which I don’t think they will, that the UN is going to fuck everything up and Fahrenheit 451 will begin in real life.

Thank you all very much for reading this. These blogs are a weekly thing I’m going to be doing from now on, I hope you enjoyed this entry, and by chance, if you care to support me financially in this juncture, then I implore you to visit my Patreon where you can help me feed myself, and then eventually move out: https://www.patreon.com/himecatherine

[himecatherine]

Fall 2015 Anime First Impressions v.2

All right, so I went through and watched the third episode of everything that I’ve been watching this season, and have a list of shows I’ll stick with until the end, but there is one show that I dropped, which I’ll get to in a second.

All right, now, starting off with Black Jack, the third episode was the best one so far. It fleshed out each character even more than the previous two did with their choices, and a huge revelation was made which helps me understand the story of the original Black Jack a little better.  I feel like the story can only get more explosive from here, and I’m going to stick with it.

Perfect Insider’s plot is completely unraveling. Big surprises are happening; more questions have been brought up regarding the pasts of each of the characters, and the ‘deathtrap’ theme is coming out more and more, leaving room for a potentially crazy, Steins;Gate level story to come out, even if it will only have 11 episodes.

Mobile Suit Gundam is getting more fun, but, the more I watch it, the less I enjoy the main protagonist and the princess. The princess is useless and her attraction to the protagonist seems very forced, and at times cringe-worthy, and the main character is a cold, fighting machine devoid of any true character depth, so far as I have seen, with his only motivation to be, “I’m doing this for my friends.” It seems like a shallow character base as everyone has motivations, goals, aspirations, and self-doubt of some kind, but this guy’s character is only: “I’ll rise to the challenge no matter what and show no regret!” to the point where he just seems dull and unrelateable, and even unnecessarily edgy at times. There are proper ways to write for cold, stoic characters, and this is a terrible example of one. It just seems like lazy writing at the end of the day, but, I’ll stick with it to see if he evolves.

Dance with Devils continues to be fun, with its story delivered in song and overflowing levels of chuuni dialogue between the male characters who all want to bang the main girl, as well as each other. It’s dumb, it’s fun, and the music is cool, so I’ll watch it all the way through.

Sakurako is still going strong. It has potential to become crazy with the story that has been set up so far, I feel, so I’ll have to see where it all goes, but for now, it’s still just her and her assistant accidentally running into crime scenes and trying to get to the bottom of the mystery, because for whatever reason the police in their city are terrible.

Comet Lucifer is blowing up very hard. The world building in this episode was fantastic, and allowed for everything to slow down from all of the introductions we had in the first two episodes, and just soak in nice and easy.  My favorite part during this episode was how there is now an inkling of an overarching plot for this story, rather than just, “a kid finds some special stuff and a mysterious girl,” and it seems like it could be very fun and well-presented if they continue to keep this steady, consistent pace.

One Punch Man, like I said from last week, even though it lacks what makes an anime 5/5 for me, a story of extreme struggle, which I have come to expect from Madhouse, it’s still well made. The animation is the most fluid I’ve seen in a very long time, the music is cool, and the character designs are great, it’s just that it lacks true depth which would, for me, make it a phenomenal show. I’ll still watch it until the end though.

Yuri Yuri knows what it is, and wants to be: a dumb, cute and funny show. There’s nothing spectacular about it, but, that’s fine. Watching it is an enjoyable experience, even if it’s not an outstanding one. I want to see this until the end like I did with the previous two seasons.

And now, for the show I dropped: Concrete Revolutio.  I feel as though this show was wasted potential. It has great character designs, so much room to build upon the alternate reality world which it presented from the beginning, as well expand on each of the characters already in the superhuman protection bureau, however, it didn’t, and I don’t think it plans on doing so either. I felt myself zoning out very hard during the third episode of this series, up to the point where I felt myself dozing off in my chair. I didn’t feel invested in the characters, the world in which they lived in, or their mission, and I don’t think I will even if I continue to watch this series. I’ll consider picking it back up again if enough of my friends recommend it to me after the season is over, but, for now, I’m going to have to just drop it.

Now go out and watch all of the shows I’m watching so we can talk about them together, because my opinion is the only one that matters. Also, I wrote a review piece over the series Gakkou Gurashi for Tacotaku, which you can find here:

http://www.tacotaku.com/reviews/school-live-review

Check it out if you have time, please.

Thank you all very much for reading this. These blogs are a weekly thing I’m going to be doing from now on, I hope you enjoyed this entry, and by chance, if you care to support me financially in this juncture, then I implore you to visit my Patreon where you can help me feed myself, and then eventually move out: https://www.patreon.com/himecatherine