#oneaday Day 416: Choose your own adventure

When I was a kid, I was really into the Choose Your Own Adventure books. I had a couple of the arguably more popular and/or well-known Fighting Fantasy ones also, but I always sort of preferred Choose Your Own Adventure. I was very much in a minority on this, but I didn't care then, and I don't care now. I am, however, now a bit more capable of reflecting on precisely why I preferred Choose Your Own Adventure to Fighting Fantasy. And, since I have a selection of the relatively recent reprints winging their way to me (one has arrived so far, but there are, I think, 11 more coming soon) I thought I might as well do just that.

To put it simply, Choose Your Own Adventure is effective because its only "gimmick" is the choices part. That means you don't need anything but the book to get started with them. Contrast with Fighting Fantasy, where you need a pencil, six-sided dice and piece of paper to play — or the oft-forgotten (and really enjoyable) Asterix Adventure Games, which came with a plastic wallet full of "props" to use as part of the proceedings.

Now, don't get me wrong, I don't dislike the extra gimmicks of Fighting Fantasy, the Asterix Adventure Games and any of the other similar things I might have engaged with in my youth. Fighting Fantasy, in particular, is a good introduction to the conventions of role-playing games — particularly their use of statistics and chance-based mechanics. The Asterix Adventure Games were just thematically quite nice — with the props you'd do things like track how much magic potion Asterix had left, use a scroll to decipher passwords, and use a translation tablet to translate Latin phrases. But you still needed a bit of space to play them.

Choose Your Own Adventure, meanwhile, you can play in bed, on the toilet, in the back of a car, halfway up a tree, in a tent in your back garden… anywhere you have hands free to read a book. And that, I think, is the chief attraction for me.

But there's more. I also liked that Choose Your Own Adventure, as a series, was thematically diverse. They weren't all swords-and-sorcery fantasy tales. They weren't all horror. They didn't all involve the same characters. There were a couple that acted as "sequels" to each other, but for the most part, they were all self-contained affairs that stood by themselves, required no prior knowledge — and often taught you a few things along the way, too.

I've been struggling to remember exactly which Choose Your Own Adventure books I had as a kid. I definitely remember having Space and Beyond, Supercomputer and, I think, Treasure Diver — the latter was enough to put me off ever wanting to try scuba diving myself thanks to its painfully vivid descriptions of getting "The Bends" — and probably a few more besides. Thus far, the only that has arrived from this new batch is Mystery of the Maya, a South American adventure which, depending on the paths you take, may or may not involve time travel. That in itself is quite impressive — the fact that it is not necessarily a time-travel adventure, depending on one of the first choices you make, should give you an idea of the flexibility of these books. This one alone claims to have 39 different endings; I've seen two so far.

I'm looking forward to exploring these books again, and I think I'm actually going to make some videos of me "playing" them, because I think that will be fun. I don't know how easy it will be to make them visually interesting, but it would seem to me that taking a "Let's Play" format for a Choose Your Own Adventure book could potentially make for an enjoyable video.

I'm going to wait until a few more have arrived before I jump into doing that — I didn't fancy doing it this weekend because I was knackered and just wanted to relax — but watch out for those soon. I can't wait to try some of the books from the series that I always wanted as a kid, but never managed to get hold of!

I've also just learned that the series came about when author Edward Packard used to tell stories to his daughters about a character named Pete, and ask them what they thought "Pete" should do next. It's like it was meant to be!

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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#oneaday Day 353: Too much media?

The world can be an overwhelming place for all manner of reasons, and one of the things most likely to overstimulate all of us at one point or another is the sheer amount of media that there is. There is more stuff in the world than one person can reasonably experience in a single lifetime, and most of us likely feel at various times like we're being pulled in multiple directions, the constant threat of Maybe Not Enjoying The Thing You Picked As Much As The Thing You Didn't Pick a common source of analysis paralysis.

Case in point: this evening, I happened to see over Andie's shoulder that she's watching a TV show called Shakespeare & Hathaway: Private Investigators. I can tell from the bits I've watched over her shoulder that I would almost certainly enjoy this show, but is it something that I "should" add to my plate, given I have games on my shelves I haven't played, DVDs and Blu-Rays on other shelves that I haven't watched, and an entire Internet full of possibilities just a click away?

The answer, of course, is "stop overthinking it, and if you think you might enjoy it, watch it". And I think I just might. It's not as if I have to commit to watching it to the exclusion of all else, and it's not as if I have to watch it every day without fail otherwise I'll forget what's going on. As a TV show, it's designed to be inherently "disposable", as horrible as that sounds to say about a creative work; perhaps "transient" is a better descriptor. It's something designed for you to enjoy in the moment, then not think particularly hard about. There are plenty of other TV shows that I've watched in the past that fall into this category — I quite often look back over past entries of this blog and see entries about shows I apparently watched but have absolutely no recollection of whatsoever — and I don't feel too bad about that. I enjoyed them in the moment, which was their purpose.

Not everything needs to have meaning, to be life-changing, or to have a particularly strong and powerful message to deliver. Sometimes entertainment is simply for entertainment's sake, and there's nothing wrong with that.

So y'know what? I think I might just start watching Shakespeare & Hathaway: Private Investigators. It looks like a fun show that I think I will enjoy, and my instincts are usually pretty good on these things. I may not remember it a year or two down the line, but does that really matter? Not at all; if it's enjoyable now, and it helps distract from the shitshow that is life in 2025, bring it on, I say. The planet might have burned down in a couple of years, and when that time comes it's not going to matter one jot what my media consumption habits were.

This isn't even a new problem. For as long as television has existed, people have doubtless agonised over which channel they should watch, or if they should do something other than watching television. That particular problem is compounded for those who had satellite or cable TV, of course, as they had even more choice. And in times before electronic media, were people agonising over which book they should read, which painting they should admire or which sonata they should play on the piano? Entirely possible.

Life is short; much too short to agonise over decisions as ultimately trivial as what you're going to do to entertain yourself of an evening. So if you feel like you might fancy something, just take the plunge and enjoy it. There are no wrong choices. (Well, there are, but that's not the sort of decision we're talking about here.) Taking care of yourself is of paramount importance, and allowing yourself to get trapped into a mental spiral of trying to prioritise things of equal unimportance is a sure-fire way to make yourself miserable.

So, y'know, don't do that. I am going to try and take my own advice here.

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#oneaday Day 311: Literary Minded

Every so often, I get really in the mood to Read Stuff. I'm in one of those moods right now; having finished Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow recently, I found myself having a curious hankering to return to a book I haven't read since my university days: Jane Eyre.

I like Jane Eyre. At least, I remember liking it when I studied it at both secondary school and university. I found its first-person narration compelling, its protagonist likeable and interesting, and its multi-phase narrative most enjoyable. I also enjoyed reading it alongside Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea, a more modern (well, 1966) novel that tells the story of the woman who would become the "madwoman in the attic" wife of Jane Eyre's Mr Rochester. That novel was also the one which introduced me to "stream of consciousness" first-person narrative, which is a format I found immediately pleasing, and promptly made use of in the vast majority of creative writing projects I have done ever since.

I haven't read any "literature" for a while, though. By "literature" I, of course, mean "older works". Most people, I'm sure, have a bit of a mental block about reading older literature due to how the language has changed and evolved considerably over time, and how this makes them "difficult" to read. For sure, reading the first few chapters of Jane Eyre on the toilet this evening required a little fine-tuning in the ol' brain to get back into the swing of things, but I remembered that despite being obviously archaic in some of its turns of phrase and lexicon, Charlotte Brontë's (or perhaps Jane's) prose is relatively breezy by the standards of certain other works from a similar period, and once you reconfigure your base frequency to match that of a novel written in 1847, it's a surprisingly easy read.

I'm also starting to feel like it's of increasing importance to keep one's brain "fresh". With how disappointingly widespread bullshit AI-generated "summaries" are becoming, I genuinely fear a bit for the future of literary analysis and study. Now, I'm not particularly intending on doing any more literary analysis on Jane Eyre than I already have done in my life, but one thing I did find during my studies in earlier years is that having an awareness of certain things actually enhances your appreciation of various works when you read them purely for pleasure.

And thus, for the first time in quite a few years, I'm going to be diving back into the literary archives and reading both some books I remember enjoying (Dracula is on my list, and perhaps the Sherlock Holmes stories) as well as some that I have never actually read — Frankenstein and Wuthering Heighs spring immediately to mind. I don't remember having read those, anyway.

It's easy to be all doom and gloom about the state of the world today, and with good reason. But good literature has always been about being able to transport you to another time, place, even world, and I feel like that is going to be of increasing importance as the years go on and our real world becomes increasingly terrible and awful. I mean, Jane Eyre has it pretty rough at various points in her story. But at least she has a degree of agency in her life, and we know her tale is going somewhere. No-one knows where the tale of life in 2025 is going, and with each passing day the possible conclusions feel a little more scary.

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#oneaday Day 306: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

I finally got around to reading a novel my mother has been bugging me to read for ages now. It's by Gabrielle Zevin and is called Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, which is one of those titles that looks more and more wrong the more times you type it out in succession. I didn't know much about the book going in other than that it was somehow related to video games, and I deliberately didn't read anything about it prior to starting it, so I had gone in with the (mistaken, as it turns out) assumption that it was going to be another Ready Player One sort of situation.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is rather different, though. While it does indeed draw inspiration from the world of video games, it is not a sci-fi novel, and the games are used more as a backdrop to what is going on rather than in-your-face references. The main story concerns two individuals who meet as children in a hospital: Sam Masur is a traumatised young man with a mangled foot after a car crash that killed his mother, while Sadie Green is an intelligent young woman who had initially been attending the hospital to visit her sister, who had leukaemia, but who subsequently managed to strike up a friendship with Sam.

The pair bond over video games, something which was clearly already important in both of their lives; Sam displays himself to be a skilled player of Super Mario Bros. when Sadie first encounters him, while Sadie has long exchanged in-jokes relating to The Oregon Trail with her sister. Sadie discovers that her interactions with Sam have caused him to speak for the first time in a very long while, and she is encouraged to see him regularly as part of the "community service" requirements for her bat mitzvah. Sam eventually discovers this — helped along by Sadie's rather jealous sister — and, understandably, begins to doubt Sadie's friendship, causing a rift between them that lasts for several years.

The pair meet again by chance several years later, when they are both nineteen years old and studying at institutions in Cambridge, Massachusetts — Sam at Harvard, Sadie at MIT. They once again bond over video games; Sadie introduces Sam to a video game she composed called Solution. Solution is an early example of an "art game"; it positions players in the role of someone working at a factory, but "completing" the game reveals that one was actually producing weapons for the Nazis in World War II. Players can alternatively complete the game by uncovering "the truth" about what they are actually up to earlier on.

Aside: real-life developer Brenda Romero believes that Solution is based a little too closely on her board game Train, which had a similar concept of going "surprise! You're a Nazi!" at its conclusion, but, as the name suggests, a different focus. I can see how she arrived at that conclusion — particularly as Zevin acknowledged the game's influence — but Sadie's Solution approaches the matter from a somewhat different angle, and Sadie, rather than Romero, being the creator is important to the story. So I think we can maybe let that slide for now.

Anyway, Solution made people in Sadie's game design class absolutely furious, as you might expect, but Sam sees something in it. And thus begins a rather tempestuous working relationship, as the pair decide to make games together — some of which are huge successes, and others of which are big fat flops.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is about video games, but it's also about the creative spirit and the balance young professionals often have to find between truly expressing themselves and doing something that will actually make them some money. It's about the wild mood swings the creative temperament can bring, and about how different ideals can sometimes lead to seemingly irreconcilable differences — and how the truly strong friendships can weather those storms, even if it takes years to do so sometimes.

The games are used as a backdrop to the main story of the relationship between Sam, Sadie and the other people who are part of their lives, both personally and professionally. Author Gabrielle Zevin admits that there are a few anachronisms in terms of the games she mentions and the times at which people are playing or discussing them, but notes that this is all in service of the story. We are, after all, talking about a fictional world that refers to a variety of things that exist in the real world — ranging from the classic arcade game Donkey Kong to the gaming lifestyle website Kotaku — and couples them with events that never actually happened. In this sense, it's an "alternate history" novel of sorts, only this history is about video games rather than, say, Hitler never having been born.

It's an interesting approach. The novel's perspective jumps around in time and in terms of which character it is focusing on at any given time. Sometimes you're "in the moment" as the events of the past are occurring; at others, the narration presents Sam and/or Sadie being "interviewed" by a real-life site (such as Kotaku) about something that never actually happened in the real world, but which was an important occurrence in this alternate history. Aside from a few early hiccups where Zevin refers to "3.25 inch floppy disks" on more than one occasion (which made me wince slightly every time), the effect is mostly very convincing; it doesn't take long before you're swept along with this account of something that could have happened in this world, but which didn't.

The novel is not just about how video games have changed over time. It's also about how attempts to introduce progressive themes into games have, at times, met with uncomfortable challenges. The novel takes this to something of an extreme — more so than anything that has, to my knowledge, happened in the real world — but the point it makes is convincing. As far as I'm aware, no-one has gone and shot up a game company in the real world over the inclusion of gay and transgender characters in a video game, but the idea is depressingly plausible. From a broader perspective, the inclusion of a sequence in Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow where one of the major characters is shot dead following such an encounter can be looked on as criticism of gun culture and violence in America, and how more often than not mass shootings are the result of a disaffected white dude who has snapped about something in his life or society.

Some of the most effective sequences in the book are where Zevin isn't afraid to get a bit weird. After the aforementioned shooting sequence, there's a peculiar second-person sequence presented as the reader occupying the role of the fatally shot character in the present tense as their life slips away. There's another sequence later where a depressed Sadie is playing a massively multiplayer online game, but it never actually mentions the character we're following is Sadie; everything is presented "in character" and "in world". Like the world of video game development, the literary techniques that Zevin uses throughout Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow never remain constant; they're always changing, developing, moving on, advancing.

It's also a novel about how women struggle to be taken seriously in what is still perceived to be a "boys' club", even with more and more evidence to the contrary that women have always been a part of gaming. Sadie continually struggles to be seen as the artist she is because Sam is better at the business aspect. Despite being depicted as somewhat awkward in the early hours of the book, he ends up becoming a confident "face of the company" when promoting their work, suggesting that there may be some sort of mental health issues in an autistic/ADHD-adjacent area at work with Sam's character; his behaviour is very consistent with hyperfixations and intense, deep passions for very specific things.

But Sadie struggles too, despite being less obviously "broken" than Sam is. She may not have suffered the traumatic, violent loss of a parent, she may not have physical mobility issues and she may come from a background of relative privilege, but there are times when she struggles. There are times when she finds herself swept up in an abusive relationship because she thinks its benefits outweigh its drawbacks. There are times she falls into an inconsolable depression, when even those closest to her cannot reach her. There are times when she simply doesn't know what to do, despite her intelligence. She suffers, too — perhaps even more than Sam does — and the story of her own trials are an important part of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow.

I'll refrain from spoiling too much more of the details of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, because I do recommend it, even if you're not "a gamer". Having the context of and an understanding of the video games referenced throughout is helpful, certainly, but this is not a story that is specifically about those video games. Instead, they're used to support the narrative and its approach to a fairly mundane but nonetheless impactful alternate history; the thrust of the story is, instead, about love, friendship, creativity, artistry and the range of challenges creative types (with varying degrees of mental health struggles) have faced over the course of the last 30-40 years or so.

So there we go. Now my mother can stop asking me if I've read it yet, because now I have!

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#oneaday Day 167: What happened to plain ol' fantasy?

This is a discussion I've had a few times on Discord of late, but I don't think I've mentioned it here. So, being in need of something to write for today, I thought I'd ponder it here.

I grew up being rather fond of fantasy — you know, swords, magic, elves, goblins, that sort of thing. I attribute this primarily to my brother's girlfriend of his teenage years introducing me to HeroQuest and the Elric of Melnibone role-playing game; I never played the latter but I did play a fair few sessions of the former, and even managed to convince my parents to get me Advanced Heroquest by Games Workshop for one birthday, which I think has successfully hit the table maybe two or three times in my entire life. (Lucky it has solid solo rules!)

Similarly, one (well, two, technically, I guess) of my favourite book series growing up was David Eddings' Belgariad/Malloreon cycle, which chronicles the rise of young farm boy Garion into a god-slaying hero and powerful sorcerer. Also of note was Douglas Hill's Blade of the Poisoner and its sequel Master of Fiends, both of which were really for kids, but which I enjoyed and re-read numerous times in my youth.

What do all the above have in common? They're all simple, straightforward, old-fashioned fantasy. I add those qualifiers because I feel we don't get a lot of simple, straightforward, old-fashioned fantasy any more. We get a shitload of "dark fantasy", sure, and we also get a lot of "ironic parody fantasy". But just straightforward, simple fantasy? That feels like a dying breed.

To clarify what I mean by these terms: by "dark fantasy" I mean a world where everyone is either miserable or fucking (often simultaneously), the streets are made of mud and the dwarves say "fuck" a lot. By "ironic parody fantasy" I mean "teeheehee, the heroes of this fantasy world know what a 'level' is and talk like they're in a Marvel movie!".

Both of these have their appeal — they must do, otherwise there wouldn't be so fucking many of both of them — but I feel we've reached a point where "subverting the expectations of the fantasy genre" is now more of a cliché than… the fantasy genre itself. I hunger for a good old-fashioned tale of swords and sorcery where no-one says "well, that happened" or "fuck", and which culminates in the plucky young hero, who came from humble beginnings, punching out some sort of god-like entity.

It doesn't even feel like we get this in video games much any more. Final Fantasy has very much gone down the "dark fantasy" route in more recent installments and I think that has been a positive move for the series — Final Fantasy XVI and Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin are particular highlights from recent memory — and a lot of anime-style RPGs play up the comedic angle somewhat. There's nothing wrong with either of these things — I enjoy both when I'm in the mood for them — but sometimes you just want something a bit more… straightforward, I guess?

I'm intrigued to try out Metaphor: ReFantazio at some indefinite point in the future, though I suspect that veers towards "dark fantasy", and I have several dungeon crawlers waiting in the wings that might fit the bill.

I'm not mad about this or anything — trends and tastes change, after all — but I just think it might be nice if we could see a bit more in the way of old-school barbarians-in-loincloths-and-wizards-with-beards fantasy. It was a defining influence on me growing up, and it would be nice to revisit that.

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2480: Too Much Information

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I listened to Dave Gorman's audiobook Too Much Information the other day. I've been a fan of Dave Gorman's intelligent comedy ever since I first saw his shows The Dave Gorman Collection and Googlewhack Adventure.

Gorman is a comedian who likes to use facts and evidence to back up the things he is talking about. In The Dave Gorman Collection, in which he travelled around the world seeking out other people called Dave Gorman, he took photographs of every meeting and recorded all manner of stats about his journey. In Googlewhack Adventure, in which he sought out people who had authored Googlewhacks — two-word search terms for which there is only a single result on Google — he again took copious notes and documentary evidence of his journey.

Too Much Information is one of Gorman's most modern works, taking a look at the modern world and the sheer amount of noise we have to put up with on a daily basis. As you can probably imagine if you've been following me for a while, this sort of thing is right up my alley.

Gorman covers a variety of topics throughout Too Much Information, including beauty adverts with hilariously poor survey results in the small print at the bottom of the screen — one product had just 47% of its (admittedly small) sample agree that it was worthwhile — and misleading newspaper headlines. He also looks at how misinformation can spread throughout social media, and has a good rant about some of his favourite bugbears, such as "greatest hits" albums that have all-new tracks on them, and services such as Spotify assuming that we always want to be sharing everything we do with the rest of the world, even if it's listening to The Wombles.

Too Much Information resonated with me a great deal, and it's a book well worth getting hold of in one form or another. It worked well as an audiobook, as the whole thing is written in Gorman's trademark "storytelling" style of comedy, which lends itself well to being recorded, but I can see it working just fine on paper, too.

While you're on, if you've never had the pleasure of experiencing Dave Gorman's past work, do take the time to check out The Dave Gorman Collection, Dave Gorman's Googlewhack Adventure and his most recent series on Dave, Dave Gorman's Modern Life is Goodish. It's a style of comedy that, so far as I'm aware, is unique to Gorman, and it's particularly entertaining for those of us who enjoy facts and figures to go along with our funny words. His "Found Poems" in Modern Life is Goodish, constructed entirely of Internet comments sections, are particularly entertaining, and a good reminder of what a bizarre and ridiculous age we live in these days.

2048: You're A Monster

0048_001 As I've mentioned a couple of times recently, I've been reading the Monster Musume manga as well as keeping up with the anime adaptation, and I've been enjoying both a great deal.

While Monster Musume is, on the surface, a somewhat pervy ecchi harem series with all the requisite sexual tension plus copious boob and panty shots (albeit attached to non-human girls with "monstrous" features), at its heart beats a heart of gold and a number of positive messages: accepting people for who they are without judgement; not relying on first impressions to figure people out; standing up for what you believe in; and forgiving people when they make a mistake, particularly if they make it while they're trying to learn something new.

I find the monster girl angle particularly interesting. As I noted when I first started checking out the anime, I'm unfamiliar with the monster girl trope in general, so it was somewhat jarring to see these obviously non-human girls initially; they've clearly all been designed with traditionally attractive anime/manga character visual tropes in mind, but in most cases there's just enough of the monstrous to make you feel a little uncomfortable if you're not already au fait with taking a walk on the wild side.

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In the case of Monster Musume, we have Miia's extremely long snake tail, its companion clumsiness and her specifically snake-like characteristics such as her fangs and the fact she sheds her skin regularly; we have Papi's bird legs and wings instead of arms attached to a distinctly young-looking body; we have the fact that Centorea's arse is a horse (and her knockers are enormous); we have the fact that Suu is a slime girl who initially is completely unable to communicate through any means other than mimicking the things she has observed others doing; and, of course, we have Rachnea the spider-lady.

It's interesting how the sequence in which these girls are introduced goes: although Miia is one of the more "monstrous" girls in a visual sense, in terms of character she's probably the most "normal", albeit rather more lovestruck than your average young woman. Papi is naive and innocent — considerably more stupid than her supposed actual age, with her intelligence and common sense more appropriate for her somewhat childlike appearance — and doesn't quite fit in to "normal" society as a result, but is still reasonably recognisable as acting somewhat "human-like". Centorea lives by some distinctly "fantasy world"-style values — all "honour" this, "my lord" that, plus her arse is a horse. Suu is in many ways the most "alien" of all the monster girls, at least in the early chapters; she has no idea that she regularly puts poor protagonist Kimihito at risk of drowning every time she embraced him a bit enthusiastically, and her initial inability to communicate puts her at a distinct disadvantage compared to the other girls (while also providing plenty of comic relief, as you might expect). Mero — who, so far, has been the least interesting, least developed character to me — presents an interesting take on attitudes to folklore by being obsessed with the tale of The Little Mermaid, but for its tragic angle rather than its romantic aspects.

In many way, though, Rachnera is one of the most interesting characters. In terms of visual design, being a spider woman, she's the most obviously "non-human" of the lot; while Suu acts in an alien manner, she at least takes on humanoid form at the best of times. Rachnera, meanwhile, is quite literally an enormous spider with a woman's upper half, and is consequently quite frightening to look at, particularly given how she's introduced in some delightfully creepy scenes. Kimihito is true to his values, though, and doesn't judge her by her appearance at all; when he first encounters her, he even appears largely dismissive of her monstrous nature and fetishises her spider legs, being a self-confessed "leg man".

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Rachnera is one of the most grounded, honest characters in Monster Musume, as it happens. She arguably acts in the most "adult" manner of the whole lot — though this can be taken in several ways, since not only is she mature in her attitudes and responses to situations, she's also very sexually aggressive. More importantly, though, she's completely at ease with herself, accepting both her monstrous nature (and all the difficulties that can sometimes cause) and her sexually adventurous side, particularly her predilection for bondage play, which a number of different cast members end up on the receiving end of with varying degrees of willingness.

To me, Rachnera was the most initially jarring monster girl to make an appearance — largely because I still haaaaate real spiders — but from what I've seen of her so far, she's also one of the most likeable. She's not necessarily the one I find the most attractive (I think that dubious honour goes to Miia) but, well, she does have a fine pair on her, and she's an interesting character whom it would probably be fun — if, at times, unsettling — to hang out with.

I'm looking forward to the rest of the series and seeing how these characters develop. It's easy to dismiss Monster Musume as cheap fanservice — as it is with many things that initially appear to be cheap fanservice — but as I've said, beneath the boobs and lamia panties (they're stick-on!) and sexual assault by slime girls, it's a delightful series with a wonderfully positive message.

I'm glad my friend Chris convinced me to check it out for myself, because without his wild enthusing about monster girls, I would have probably thought I'd be too squicked out by the girls' more monstrous aspects to enjoy it. But, as it turns out, it's not at all difficult to start accepting people just as people, regardless of what their extremities look like…

1796: Read Me a Story

Since I was getting really quite frustrated with my daily commute to and from work — there is no good time of the day where you can set out and head back without getting caught in a traffic jam with seemingly no cause — I decided to try something a bit different with my audio entertainment for said journey.

Rather than listening to the radio, with its same five adverts and playlist of approximately twelve songs, or the same albums on my phone over and over again, I decided to listen to some audiobooks.

I've listened to audiobooks a few times over the years, most recently when I was in the habit (that I should probably get back into) of taking a long walk most days. They provide a good accompaniment to tedious activities like walking or driving, and I've found they've had a positive effect on my mood overall, even when the M27 is at its most frustrating. The fact that I can tune out the fact I'm moving at approximately 15mph on a road designed to be travelled along at 70mph+ and instead concentrate on an unfolding narrative is pleasurable, and getting to spend more time immersing myself in a story becomes nice rather than frustrating.

The audiobooks I've been listening to most recently belong to a genre I haven't read a lot of in the past: crime fiction. I can't remember how I first came on to the Kay Scarpetta series by Patricia Cornwell, but I've been enjoying them so far: I'm currently about a third of the way through the third book.

For the unfamiliar, the Kay Scarpetta series follows the eponymous heroine, the chief medical examiner for Virginia, and her obligatory "buddy" cop Pete Marino. The two have an enjoyable working relationship and rapport with one another, Kay being rather sensible for the most part — with occasional lapses in judgement and a tendency to attract the main villain of each book to cause some sort of dramatic final confrontation in the closing chapters — and Marino being brash, outspoken and not always entirely tactful.

The stories are interesting when compared to other crime fiction I've encountered — be it in books, on TV, in games or in movies — in that the main focus isn't on the police investigation, the work of an agent on the case or a private investigator. Rather, Kay is essentially a civilian, albeit one with access to information about the corpses that show up in each novel that the public would probably rather not know about. This doesn't stop her ending up embroiled deep in the mysteries, however, and indeed it's usually her actions that, if they don't outright solve the case altogether, certainly put into motion a chain of events that draws the main villain out of hiding (and usually into Kay's bedroom) in order to be caught and/or killed.

They're formulaic and somewhat predictable at times, in other words, but they're filled with interesting characters, and the narrator for the audiobook versions, one Lorelei King, does an admirable job at putting on unique voices for the different characters — even if all her "male" voices tend to end up sounding terribly serious about everything they say… or perhaps this is a side-effect of Cornwell's male characters?

Anyway. I'm enjoying the experience of listening to audiobooks, and I've been enjoying discovering a series of entertaining crime novels in the process. There's plenty more where that came from, too, so I should be kept reasonably sane on my journeys to and from work for the immediate future, at least…

1543: Secret Diaries

Sue Townsend apparently died today. As with any "celebrity" (or at least well-known person) death, I'm not sure whether I really feel "sad" about this, but it's certainly the end of an era, and I definitely have some very fond memories of her work.

The Adrian Mole books that she wrote are, I think, the books I've re-read the most number of times in my life. When I first acquired copies of the first two books — battered old hand-me-downs with pages falling out; copies that I imagine used to belong to my brother — I had literally no idea what to expect. I didn't even know whether Adrian Mole was a person or some sort of anthropomorphized Wind in the Willows-style character.

It wasn't very long before I was hooked. I started reading them at just the right age, and managed to catch the subsequent books at similarly relevant points throughout my life. While I've enjoyed the whole series over time, I feel that the first two books in particular — The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 3/4 and The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole — remain the highlights for me. I retain, to this day, something of a fascination with teenage life; a fascination that I can continually indulge thanks to anime, TV shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and all manner of other media. I think it's the whole "coming of age" thing that appeals to me; seeing people go through genuinely formative experiences and changing as a result.

The events that transpire in the Adrian Mole books are all rather mundane in nature, but help to shape Adrian into the person he later becomes. While he ends up not exactly realising a lot of his potential in later life, he remains, for the most part, a relatable character with whom I often found myself identifying, particularly in the early books. His feeling of slight detachment from the rest of the world, particularly when it came to being "cool", making friends or talking to girls, was something that I also found myself experiencing, and while I stopped short of considering myself an "intellectual" at the age of 13, there were times that I felt I could have been writing that secret diary myself.

In fact, I did write several secret diaries over the years, beginning shortly after when I read the Adrian Mole books. Sadly, all of these (to my knowledge, anyway) have been lost to the mists of time, usually because I ended up writing something that embarrassed myself so much that I threw the whole thing away so there was absolutely no risk of anyone else ever having the chance of stumbling across it. I kind of regret that now; much as I regularly like browsing back over my entries on this blog — the Random Post button at the top is a vaguely fun time if you have nothing better to do — I also liked looking back over old diaries and reading my thoughts and feelings about things. During my teenage years, entries were often about girls and my various feelings towards them, inevitably unrequited. During my university years, entries were often about girls, too, but also, I feel, sparked the beginning of my coming to understand my own anxiety and depression issues — issues that I'm still coming to terms with today.

If nothing else, writing down thoughts and feelings about things — even the most mundane things — can prove to be an enormously cathartic experience. I know that the fact my romantic (and, uh, erotic) feelings towards several girls in high school were inevitably unrequited was made somewhat easier to deal with by having that "release" of writing down how I felt about these things at times; and when I tried my hand at writing a diary again a couple of times during my university studies, it proved to be similarly helpful.

What I'm doing with this blog is, for the most part, the same thing; the difference here is that it's public and digital rather than scrawled in biro and hidden under my mattress. Regular readers will know I'm pretty open about a lot of things, though, and the world hasn't ended as a result; perhaps if someone had inadvertently stumbled across those secret diaries — or, if they did, spoken up about them — it wouldn't have been all that bad.

Or perhaps it could have been the most mortifying experience in the world. I guess we'll never know, now.

Oh, and if, by any chance, through some twisting and turning of the worldlines, my 14-year old self ends up reading this? Give up on Nikki, mate; she's well out of your league.

1530: 50 BC

Over the intervening years since leaving home, I've either discarded or left behind a lot of the trappings of childhood. But one of the things that has constantly travelled with me is my modest collection of Asterix books — by no means complete, not by a long shot, but consisting of a number of adventures I occasionally like to revisit.

For those unfamiliar with Asterix — I'm not sure how well known it is these days — it was (is?) a series of full-length comic book stories based in the era of the Roman occupation of Gaul, circa 50 BC. Originally composed by French duo Goscinny and Uderzo and subsequently translated into a variety of different languages around the world, the stories combine a certain degree of real-life ancient history with material that is played purely for laughs to ridiculous effect. Central to all the stories are the eponymous protagonist Asterix, a cunning Gaul who is usually entrusted with his village's most important matters, and his overweight, somewhat dim friend Obelix who fell into a cauldron of magic potion as a baby and was consequently blessed with permanent superhuman strength.

The books range from relatively small-scale adventures in which Asterix and his friends defend the village from the Roman encampments that surround them to grand adventures that see the indomitable Gauls heading off to places such as India and the Middle East. Elements of sci-fi and fantasy — usually in the form of magic — are incorporated into some of the later books, but the emphasis is always on vaguely plausible but ridiculous situations that poke fun at modern society through the lens of ancient Roman times.

A particularly identifiable characteristic of the English translations — I can't speak for the other languages — is the sheer number of utterly cringeworthy puns used throughout, usually in the form of character names. Asterix and Obelix are pretty self-explanatory, but they're joined by village chief Vitalstatistix, druid Getafix, blacksmith Fulliautomatix, fishmonger Unhygienix, bard Cacofonix and numerous others. The female Gaulish characters have similarly unsubtle names — Vitalstatistix's wife is called Impedimenta, for example — as do the Romans, who usually have amusing Latin names of some description. One story features a centurion called Cumulo Nimbus, for example, while another features an athletic legionary called Gluteus Maximus.

The books are filled with visual gags, too, not just in the panels' artwork, but in elements such as typesetting and fonts, too. An Egyptian adventure in which Asterix and friends visit Cleopatra, for example, features a number of sequences in which Egyptian characters "speak" in hieroglyphics, for example, while in Asterix and the Great Crossing, which sees Asterix and Obelix initially accidentally discovering America and subsequently coming into contact with some Viking explorers on the way home, the language barrier between the Gauls and the Vikings is represented by the latter adding stereotypically "Scandinavian" punctuation to the things they're saying. It's a visual equivalent of the TV series Allo Allo representing characters speaking in different languages through different accents, essentially.

What I've been most surprised about on this most recent revisiting of the few Asterix books I do own is the fact that they hold up very well despite, in some cases, dating back to the 1960s. Not all humour ages terribly well and indeed there are certain elements of the Asterix books that clearly come from a, shall we say, somewhat unenlightened age, particularly when it comes to depictions of people of non-white races, but to be honest, there's a certain appeal to the fact that the early books in particular just don't give a toss about political correctness and end up being often darkly hilarious as a result.

I've never got around to expanding my collection since leaving home, but I've now read the few Asterix books I do own so many times to know them pretty much inside out. Perhaps I should look into getting some of the ones I've never read — if these ones hold up well enough, then it'd be a pleasure to read some completely new ones that I don't know at all.