1587: The Most Important Part of Moving

Unpacking shit, painting and hammering nails into walls are all very important parts of moving house, but by far the most important thing to do is to determine whether or not your local takeaways are any good. The prime time to do this is immediately after you’ve moved, when you almost certainly don’t have anything good in the fridge or freezer. And we’ve been doing just that.

Last night we tried the local chippy, which is just over the road from us. It seemed pretty good — as good as a chippy ever is, anyway — and was noteworthy for having absolutely astronomical portions. The definition of a “large” chips varies enormously from chip shop to chip shop, and it seems that this place errs on the side of “large” meaning “enough to feed at least four people”. Hard to beat value like that.

Tonight, on the other hand, we gave the local Indian takeaway a go. This, too, is just across the road from us, and appears to have some involvement with one of the best curry houses in Southampton: Kuti’s Brasserie on Oxford Street. We popped in yesterday to grab a menu and have a quick look and it smelled amazing, so after receiving a generous cash gift from my grandmother in the post today, we thought we’d give it a go to see what it was like.

Turns out it was delicious, and again, very good value for money. Andie and I bought a couple of mains, a couple of starters, a couple of rices and a couple of bready things for a little under £30 and all that was clearly enough for about four people instead of just the two of us; consequently, a hefty chunk of it has gone into the fridge for warming up as leftovers at some point.

One of my favourite Indian takeaways was in the Sholing area of Southampton when I used to live there. The building where my flat was located was attached to a small block of little shops and offices, and among the shops on the ground floor was an Indian takeaway, the name of which I’ve since forgotten. I have vivid memories of going in there, however, because the guy who owned it had obviously seen us moving all our stuff in: the night we moved in and wanted nothing more than to simply stuff our faces with delicious food we didn’t have to cook ourselves, I was greeted by the gentleman in question standing behind the counter of his takeaway, arms splayed wide as if he was about to embrace me, bellowing “Welcome to the Sholing!” (The takeaway was not, I don’t believe, called “The Sholing”; his greeting was simply a slightly broken English welcome to the area, which was simply called “Sholing” rather than “The Sholing”.)

Our experience with Kuti’s Express this evening wasn’t quite as heartwarming as that particular incident, but the food was good and you can order online to collect about 30 minutes later, so that’s all good. And I’m almost certain we’ll be heading back there — particularly with my board gaming friends’ affinity for the spicy side of cuisine.

1586: pkunzip -d house.zip

The unpacking is done! I think. Unless there’s a secret box hiding somewhere, just waiting to taunt me with its meaningless contents. If there is a secret box hiding somewhere, just waiting to taunt me with its meaningless contents, my response to it right now would almost certainly be to simply empty its meaningless contents straight into the bin. The house is full; there’s no more room for crap.

That’s not entirely true, of course — though I’ve had to find some creative storage solutions in my study — but this place most certainly now looks “lived in”, in a good way. We have Things on Shelves in a vaguely organised fashion — the shelves in the living room are the best example of this, while the rickety bookcase in my study shouldn’t be examined too closely lest one of the two loose shelves come crashing down, bringing a ton of heavy books with them — and there are places to sit. (We have two sofas in our living room, but that’s largely because we had to buy a second one in the previous place because our nice leather sofabed wouldn’t go up the damn stairs. Here, meanwhile, it came through the door without a single issue — and thankfully without any damage from having been kept in the garage for a year and a half.)

We even have a spare bedroom, which is a first for me. (Second bedrooms in places I’ve lived have tended to end up converted to office/study space — here, we not only have a spare bedroom, but a study each.) Said spare bedroom had a bit of a paint accident earlier, leading to an ugly bare patch in the middle of the wall, but that was the one room we haven’t yet redecorated anyway. I guess now there’s an incentive to get it done, huh?

The area that probably needs the most work at present is the dining room, which is in the small extension on the back of the house. Right now, we have a half-full shelf of board games — the other half of the board games are proudly displayed in the living room — and some display cabinets that Andie is yet to put her ample Lego collection in. Sitting in the centre of the room and looking rather lonely is the dining table and chairs I inherited from my former housemate Claire; the chairs are old and faded and the table is far too small for the space it occupies. At the very least, the table will be replaced with something much bigger at some point: the aim is for the dining room to become a suitable space for playing sprawling board games in. The room is certainly big enough; we just need a nice flat surface to put all those bits of card, wood and plastic on.

Anyway. I’m aware I’m becoming a house bore. This is probably the last “yay house” post for a while yet, since most of the major things — unpacking, mainly — are done. There’s a minor bit of decorating to do here and there still, and I’m sure we’ll find some “projects” we want to work on in the near future. But what was an empty, slightly grubby house a few days ago is now very much a place where we live.

And Andie and I have both agreed that we are not moving again, ever.

Uh-huh. Sure.

1585: Taxing Polls

Did you vote today? I did, and so did Andie. I don’t actually really care all that much whether or not you did — I’m guessing you didn’t if you’re reading this from outside the UK — but it seems to be “the done thing” to ask today.

For those reading from outside the UK, it was a combination of local elections and European elections today. I don’t follow politics with any great interest, so I’m not really 100% sure what both of these elections will decide in the long term, but I do know that a significant proportion of people on the Internet were absolutely adamant that we must not vote for UKIP.

UKIP, for the uninitiated, are a party led by a sour-faced trout called Nigel Farage who are strongly in favour of, among other things, the UK’s independence from the rest of Europe. They’ve also garnered something of a reputation in recent weeks in particular for being possibly a little bit racist, maybe. Not quite as flagrantly, unashamedly racist as the British National Party (BNP), mind, but still enough to give people pause, especially if they are a member of an ethnic minority group or an immigrant themselves.

Before we go any further, I’ll note up front that I didn’t vote UKIP. I disagree with what I know of their policies, I don’t like racist attitudes and I think Nigel Farage is a twat. This site also suggested that I fundamentally disagreed with UKIP on all but three of the thirty different policies and opinions it tested, and had the greatest affinity with the Green Party, most closely followed by the Lib Dems, then after a bit of a gap, Labour and the Conservatives. I didn’t have any particularly strong feelings before taking the test, so I voted Green today. They’re one of those parties that are pretty unlikely to ever have any real power, but the way democracy is supposed to work is through you voting for the party that most closely aligns with your beliefs, right?

Anyway. Now I’ve said that, I feel I can say that the run-up to this election has been absolutely insufferable largely due to the number of smug people pointing out with great delight how they’re not going to be voting for UKIP. I saw the same “hilarious” Twitter messages that “Farage hates” being retweeted time and time again; the same Stewart Lee speech shared over and over again; the same people congratulating one another on how awesomely politically switched-on they were.

Trouble is, the stated (or implied) intent in what these people were doing — to convince other people that voting UKIP would be a bad idea — was somewhat flawed. When it comes to political views, people are pretty ill-informed (I’m a fine example) and yet pretty stubborn when it comes to which party they choose to attach themselves to. (I am less of a fine example of this latter aspect.) This means that when you proudly declare how awful UKIP are and how you wouldn’t possibly vote for them ever, and how nobody else should vote for them ever, you’re not changing anyone’s mind. If anything, all you’re doing is reinforcing your own beliefs — and those of people you know already agree with you — and causing those people who do claim to support UKIP to dig their heels in and be more determined to vote for this party you detest and despise. Meanwhile, you end up irritating the fuck out of the people who don’t feel particularly strongly one way or the other and who wish the Internet would go back to arguing about whether 1080p and 60 frames per second really matters.

I suppose I can’t really fault people for at least appearing to stand up for what they believe in — particularly in these increasingly apathetic times. I simply don’t feel that the way people have chosen to express themselves in this instance — as with so many topics that people get passionate about on the Internet — has been particularly helpful or productive.

I guess we’ll find out when we hear the results of the elections, won’t we?

1584: Seriously, Hire Movers

I am writing this from my new bed in my new house. Downstairs is a partially unpacked living room, a not-at-all unpacked study and a mostly done kitchen. I am pleasantly, satisfyingly tired, and not feeling stressed out about the house or the things in it. Moving Day has, in short, been a Big Success.

And a significant part of this can be attributed to one thing: the fact we hired a removals company. Not a man with a van, not some friends who offered to help, a professional removals company.

They weren’t cheap, mind, though thankfully they weren’t one of the companies that wanted to charge us over a thousand pounds to move our stuff less than two miles down the road. (We get the impression that the companies who quoted us particularly stupid prices simply didn’t want to do the job — fair enough, since it involved lugging a shit-ton of stuff down from a second-floor flat, but it would have perhaps been nice if they’d just said that rather than arguably attempting to take advantage of us.)

But no, the company we used — Robinsons, if you’re curious — were great. They showed up promptly at the agreed time with a big truck that was more than capable of fitting all our stuff in — I’ve proven on more than one occasion that I have too much stuff for a Transit van by myself, let alone with Andie’s stuff in there too — and then proceeded to lug everything down the stairs for us while we alternated between twiddling our thumbs, making cups of tea for them and playing games on our phones, the only entertainment devices that were still within easy reach.

Then they drove the truck to our new place, unloaded everything and were gone before 4pm. If we’d been doing this ourselves, we’d still be shifting things well into the night, probably taking multiple trips and getting increasingly irritable.

But nope; the additional expense was well worth it for the peace of mind and lack of stress it brought. Tomorrow we can wake up refreshed and tackle the rooms that still need working on. We can buy and fit a dishwasher. And then we can flop down on the sofa — the sofa which wouldn’t fit up the stairs to our previous flat and which we consequently haven’t had the chance to sit on for a year and a half — to watch some television, safe in the knowledge that holy shit, this house actually belongs to us. Pretty neat, no?

Now it may be a ridiculously lame hour but I’m off to get some sleep. Photos will undoubtedly follow at some point in the near future once the place is a little more presentable!

1583: Imminent New Digs

So, this time tomorrow we should be officially moved in to our new house. We almost certainly won’t have everything unpacked by then — though I guess you never know! — but we will be in there. Which will be nice.

This all seems to have rolled around rather quickly and surprisingly smoothly. You hear all sorts of horror stories about people buying houses (particularly their first house) that are full of stupid words like “gazumping” and this has just been… well, pretty straightforward, really, and we haven’t had to do nearly as much faffing around as I thought we’d have to. It was pretty much a case of going in to the estate agents, saying “we want to buy this house”, answering a few questions and then, a couple of months later, taking possession of our new house.

That’s an oversimplification, of course, though not by much; the people we were buying the place from didn’t dick around, and even the lawyers didn’t seem to spend too much time arguing with one another, though there was a little of that. The process was so smooth and straightforward that the act of handing over a not-insignificant amount of money for the deposit felt no more “serious” than just paying a bill or something. And now here we are; one sleep away from moving in.

While I was working last week, Andie and her mother spent a lot of time doing the new place up — painting, hanging curtains, cleaning, that sort of thing. I helped with a bit of the painting, but I stayed out of the way for most of it largely because I was busy, but also because I don’t trust myself an inch with DIY. As a homeowner I’m supposed to start caring about this stuff now, I think, but I’ve never been particularly fussy about what colour my walls are or if they match the ceiling; generally speaking, so long as I have walls around me and a roof that doesn’t leak above me, I’m fine. (Oh, and it should preferably be a comfortable temperature, too; warm when it’s cold outside, cool when it’s hot outside.)

I’m interested to see what it will look like with our stuff in it. It’s been a little hard to picture so far, but I’m sure it’s going to look good. I’m looking forward to having my own downstairs study for working — though with my current employment situation, it remains to be seen how much use it will be getting on a professional basis — and having an actual spare bedroom. We have a brand new bed, too, which I’m hoping is going to be significantly more comfortable than our current one.

There are still acquisitions to make before it will feel “finished” — though I’m aware once you own a house it’s never truly “finished”. We need a big-ass dining table for our extension out the back — big enough to fit sprawling board games, specifically — and we’re getting a dishwasher and tumble dryer, too. The dishwasher in particular is something I’m looking forward to; there are few chores I hate more than washing up. I’m not sure why, but my mind has always somehow equated dirty plates with being utterly disgusting — even if you’ve only just finished eating off them — and thus sticking my hands into a bowl of water with them has never been especially appealing. If you can get a magic box to wash them for you, then great; having our own place gives us the freedom to do just that which you just don’t get in most rental properties.

Oh, and we’re probably going to get a dog, too. We both quite wanted a cat, but we feel that would probably be foolish while we still have the rats Clover and Socks. Neither of them are big fans of coming out of the cage — except to climb up it and get into their Lego house that we usually put on top of it — so it probably wouldn’t be a problem, but I still feel it’s probably best not to risk having them in the house with an animal that might want to eat them. A dog, I feel, is less likely to want to munch on them — plus it’s a good excuse to go out and about and get some exercise by giving it walks every day.

Anyway, this is all hypothetical for now, but it’s not long until it becomes reality. Pretty exciting — though to be perfectly honest I’m looking forward to the “exciting” bit being over and just being able to get down to some serious and much-needed relaxation.

1582: My Phone’s Not Called “Mate”

So, an update on how I’m doing with my new phone after several days of fiddling around with it. (Said new phone, if you missed my post from the other day, is an HTC One M8 — my first Android phone, though not my first Android device.)

I’m really liking it! Like, way more than I thought I would. There are flaws, certainly — the phone has frozen and rebooted itself while I was in the middle of doing something rather more times than I would have preferred it to in the last few days — but on the whole, it’s been a great experience so far and I dare say that I am actually starting to prefer it to iOS.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not going to suddenly become an Android fanboy, largely because I find Android fanboys to be some of the most insufferable fanboys on the entire Internet. Nor do I feel that iOS is now “bad” because of the time I’ve spent with Android. But there are clear and discrete markets for both, and they both do their own thing extremely well.

iOS, like most of Apple’s other products these days, is designed to be accessible, simple and straightforward. I hesitate to say “designed for stupid people” but it’s certainly designed in such a manner that stupid people can’t break it easily. It doesn’t blind you with unnecessary information — if there’s something it can do quietly in the background without telling you what’s going on, it will. This is great for people who panic when they see technical messages they don’t understand; however, on the flip side, it’s less than ideal for computer-literate people who like to know what their device is up to — and if it’s up to something it shouldn’t be (or not up to something it should be).

There are two features on iOS where this is painfully apparent, and as I count myself in the more “computer literate” camp they’d been becoming increasingly frustrating to me.

First up is Photo Stream, a feature whereby you take a photo with the phone’s camera and it gets automatically backed up to your iCloud account and synced to any other devices you’ve also logged into iCloud with. This is, in theory at least, extremely useful for backing up images and just for transferring them from one device to another — from phone to computer, say — without having to faff around with long-winded sync processes or additional hardware. And, a good 90% of the time, it was great. The trouble was, for that remaining 10% of the time it would just not work, and it certainly wasn’t going to tell you why. I eventually managed to figure out that if Photo Stream wasn’t syncing it was generally for one of two reasons (the battery being below 20% or you not being connected to Wi-Fi) but the phone certainly didn’t tell me that.

iTunes Match, the service that allows you “cloud” access to your full iTunes music library from any device, is the same way. A few weeks back, my iPhone simply started refusing to download certain iTunes tracks to itself, which made loading it up with tunes to take on a long trip to be troublesome at best, completely impossible at worst. Again, there was no means of getting feedback on what was going wrong and why some tracks would download but others wouldn’t; it simply wouldn’t do it. Infuriating. But I can sort of understand why Apple chose not to put frightening error messages in there — so as not to scare off the casual, less computer-literate people.

Android’s big selling point is its customisability, and to be fair I haven’t explored that a great deal with my new device just yet — I’ve been largely happy with the stock options so far. It comes preloaded with a standard app launcher and a special “car mode” with big buttons and quick access to music, navigation and other useful features you might need while driving, but I know the option is there for further customisation. I also like how you can have things installed on the device but not visible on the home screen.

What I’ve really liked so far is the notifications system. I can clear all my notifications with a simple tap on a button, or I can also take action on a lot of them right from the notifications feed — reply to a tweet, archive an email, all manner of other things. It took a little adjusting to the fact that the phone doesn’t display messages on the home screen like the iPhone does, but having used it for a few days now, it’s actually quite nice to have the peace and be able to review notifications at your leisure rather than when your phone thinks you should.

Plus there’s the sound. I’m not normally a fan of playing music out of a mobile phone, but the M8 has some surprisingly competent speakers. They’re never going to rival a proper setup, of course, but they’re loud, reasonably beefy considering their size, and they make listening to music or podcasts without headphones while doing other things — housework, for example, or, more relevantly to now, packing — eminently practical. Combine with Google Music’s much better, more stable implementation of “cloud music” than iTunes Match offers along with the ability to put an extra SD card in there for storage and you have a device that is a kick-ass media player as well as a solid communication device, too.

So I’m liking it a lot so far, and I’m certainly not missing my iPhone, which I gave to O2 for recycling in exchange for a little over a hundred quid — not to be sniffed at for minimum effort. Whether or not I’ll stick with Android in the long term remains to be seen, but frankly it’s looking quite positive right now.

1581: Two Days

I’m tired, hot and stressed out. We’re moving on Wednesday, which means we have two more days to pack up all our stuff and be ready. I’m sure we’ll manage it, but right now my own feelings of exhaustion — brought on at least partly by the incredibly hot, humid weather we’ve had today — are making that “motivation” thing somewhat troublesome.

I’m sure it’s not as bad as it looks. I hope it’s not as bad as it looks. There is still a lot of stuff to pack into boxes, but at least we had a pretty ruthless clearout of books today, meaning there are a lot fewer of those to move than there once were. It was a little odd to throw out a number of books that have followed me around from house to house since before I went to university, but there’s really no point in carrying a lot of them around any more. All the fiction books I own that I’m going to read I have already read, and if I want a new book I’m more inclined to buy a digital book to read on the go rather than a physical one these days. (A curious inversion of my attitude to video games, where I prefer to have a physical disc.) The reference books I own are outdated and have been made largely obsolete by the Internet anyway. And I’ve resigned myself to the fact that I am never, ever going to read The Lord of the Rings. And so off for recycling they all go.

The last time I was so ruthless with my possessions was a few years back when I ditched the large cardboard outer boxes for the older PC games I still own. There are occasional times when I regret doing that, but my available shelf space thanks me. To be perfectly honest, I could probably stand to throw out some of those old PC games, too, given that a significant proportion of them almost certainly won’t run on a modern Windows 7 machine, but I can’t quite bring myself to throw some of them out. At least I haven’t been able to to date; perhaps I’ll have a closer look at what’s there tomorrow and actually chuck out the games that won’t work on a modern system and which have modernised digital equivalents available from somewhere like GOG.com or Steam.

It’s easy to get attached to possessions and fall into a habit of hoarding. I’ve done that to a certain degree over the years, but in a lot of cases the things that I’ve kept are conversation pieces. Someone sees I have an original copy of Wing Commander III on my shelf and it’s all “oh, cool! I remember that!” That’s also one of the big reasons I keep a big physical collection of console games from the PS1 era onwards — they look cool, they sometimes spark conversations and, frankly, I just like it. (One day I might return to collecting cartridges for older systems, but to be honest I’m much more inclined to return to a PS1 game than an N64 game. Sorry, Nintendo fans.)

Anyway, as the rambling nature of this post will attest, I am far too tired to be able to do anything particularly productive for the rest of this evening, so I think it’s time for me to get into bed. Tomorrow I am getting a haircut — it may sound ridiculous, but I’m convinced part of my tiredness at the moment is coming from the mane I’m currently sporting making my head far too hot — and then coming back to do some packing, packing, packing. Then it’s my final Japanese class for the academic year in the evening, and then probably some more packing, packing, packing.

I’m really looking forward to being in the new house. I just wish all the other stuff wasn’t between me and being able to snuggle down in our lovely brand-new bed.

1580: No, Not the Boxes

Well, we’re nearly there. We own a house, Andie has spent most of this week redecorating it (and done a great job) while I’ve been working, and we have the movers booked for Wednesday.

All that remains to do is to pack everything u–

Shit.

I really, really hate packing to move house. I also hate unpacking at the other end, but that’s marginally better because you get to find new homes for things and figure out aesthetically pleasing arrangements for things like video games and board games and other stuff you might want to display.

But before you can do that, you have to put everything into boxes. And inevitably you don’t have quite enough boxes, or you can’t quite fit everything in one “category” neatly into one box, meaning you end up dumping things in semi-randomly as you get more and more tired and annoyed at the whole hideous process, until eventually you simply resort to grabbing handfuls of possibly related things, throwing them into a box in a disorganised heap, then taping the box up, writing “STUFF” or “MISC” on it and ensuring it’s the very, very last thing you unpack. (In the process, you’ll almost certainly realise that something you really, really need is in there, but you just won’t be able to face digging through the mountains of crap that are almost certainly piled on top of it.)

In other words, yes, I am really not looking forward to packing everything up. I’m thinking I might take the opportunity to ditch some stuff — primarily books that are likely never going to be read again and clothes that haven’t been worn for years in some cases — and minimise the packing of unnecessary crap. I know it’s still going to be a massive pain, but at least we don’t have to actually pick up and carry stuff ourselves this time. I hate that even more than putting things in boxes, particularly as the weather seems to have suddenly got hot and humid lately, so I’m more than happy to pay people money to carry heavy things for me.

Mostly I just want the tedious side of moving to be over and done with and this (our old) place to be clean so I can settle down, relax a bit and look forward to — hopefully — a significant number of years in the same place. Outside of living back with my parents, I’ve never stayed in the same place for longer than about two years, tops, and the prospect of getting to stay somewhere for a significant amount of time — a place where I don’t have to feel guilty about hammering nails or picture-hooks into the walls — is, frankly, extremely appealing. The fact it’s big enough to have guests over — we have a spare bedroom for the first time in my life — is something I’m particularly happy about, and I’m looking forward to actually inviting people over to stay at some point.

So it’s nice to look forward to what the eventual goal is. But I’m conscious that we’re moving in a few days and there are a lot of things to put into boxes. So I supposed we’d better start soon, huh?

1579: “Android?”

I took a bold step and did something very brave today. I… I…

I switched from iOS to Android.

Okay, “very brave” might be understatement of the century, but despite being curious about Google’s mobile OS, I’ve resisted the temptation to ditch the iPhone series to date, largely because I felt that I was too invested in the iOS ecosystem to make breaking free practical.

I pondered this recently, though, and realised that I actually wasn’t all that dependent on the iOS ecosystem at all. I run my mail, contacts and calendars through Google, I socialise through Facebook, Twitter and Google+, I take notes in Evernote and… well, that’s about it, to be frank; I’m not an especially adventurous mobile user these days, largely because I feel that 95% of apps released these days are superfluous, pointless crap that no-one needs.

And so it is that I find myself with an HTC One “Don’t Call Me Mate” M8 Android handset. It’s a rather larger handset than the iPhone 4S I was using before, and it’s larger than Andie’s iPhone 5S, too. I once thought that large phones were worthy of mockery, but having been using the HTC for a day I’m already feeling the benefit of the larger screen size. It’s not a huge amount bigger than an iPhone, but it’s a significant enough difference that things don’t feel nearly as cramped.

Bringing mail, contacts and calendars across was straightforward and easy because I was using Google. The one thing I was a little concerned about was being able to manage my music — something that I have, to date, relied on iTunes for. It turns out that Google’s Google Music service has seemingly been designed for this exact situation, allowing you the ability to upload up to 20,000 tracks directly from your iTunes library to then be available for streaming or caching from anywhere. You can listen to them via the Chrome-based web player, or on your Android phone. There’s even an optional Spotify-like subscription service where you can stream music you don’t own, so as of today I’ve cancelled my Spotify Premium account and gone with Google instead.

There are things to adjust with on the new phone. Not having notifications on the lock screen is very odd having had them for several generations of iOS hardware, but this is more than made up for by the fact you can dismiss all notifications at once from the notification centre. I haven’t delved particularly into the customisation side of things yet, but I understand with a bit of fiddling and tweaking it’s possible to rectify this behaviour if it really bothers me.

There are a few things I really like. The fact that if you download an app and discover it’s shit, you can delete it and automatically receive a refund if you do so within 15 minutes of purchasing. The way apps work together, sharing information much more easily than on iOS. The way the on-screen keyboard does a fake “haptic feedback” thing where it vibrates very slightly every time you press a key. The camera on this particular device is supposed to be very good, too, but I haven’t really tried it as yet.

So far I’m very happy with the new device so far, particularly as the tariff I’ve moved to post-upgrade is, for once, actually a better deal than the one I was on previously. I’m paying the same and getting more cellular data allowance plus “4G” speeds where they’re available, so the overall experience should be superior. I’m looking forward to exploring what it’s capable of further; it’s a pleasant and fun change, and wasn’t riddled with nearly as many difficulties as I was expecting.

But don’t worry. I’m not going to become one of those douchebags who comments on every article about a new iOS app/game and just says “Android?” like a brainwashed parrot. iOS is still great at what it does, and if you claim to be a lover of tech, you should be interested and curious in all the alternatives out there rather than swearing blind corporate allegiance to one company purely because they make the handset you currently own.

But that’s probably a discussion for another day. I’m going to go and lie in bed and fiddle with my phone for a bit now. Or possibly just play Nanaca Crash on it.

1576: Angel Beats: Gone Before Your Time

Looking back on recent entries, it occurs to me that I never summed up my final thoughts on the anime Angel Beats!, so let’s rectify that right now, shall we?

Angel Beats! was an excellent show, tragically cut short by a not-insignificant degree: about 7 episodes, to be exact. What ended up as a 13-episode show was originally intended to be explored more fully across a larger number of episodes, but it never got the opportunity; there is supporting material in other forms of media, apparently, but the anime itself leaves a significant number of unanswered questions and rushes through its latter half at a disappointingly rapid clip.

Despite this aspect, however, it’s still a great show, and shouldn’t be passed up on just because it has stuff “missing”. On the contrary, it has the feel of a great, unfinished work of art about it, and one can’t help but wonder if, on a different worldline, the world was ever graced with a full 20-episode run of Angel Beats!

But enough about what the show doesn’t have; what it does have is a whole lot of personality. Like Clannad, which a lot of the same people worked on, Angel Beats! features a combination of light-hearted humour and tearjerking scenes that will put your heart through a wringer. The juxtaposition of the two elements is, I feel, even more considerably pronounced than it was in Clannad; while Clannad had a few silly characters — Fuuko and, at times, Kotomi being probably the most obvious examples from the main cast — Angel Beats! has a lot more in the way of self-consciously silly, slapstick scenes. There’s a beautiful sequence in one episode, for example, that sees the main cast attempting to create a distraction in class — a distraction that is achieved by, of all things, several cast members’ chairs being equipped with small rocket engines that send them blasting off into the ceiling. The sheer unexpectedness of this sequence coupled with its deliberately melodramatic presentation — when they’re blasting off, they do so in slow motion, accompanied by the heartfelt, tearjerking main ending theme to the series — makes it genuinely hilarious.

But then, often within the same episode where something ridiculous happened, there’ll be at least one moment that will have all but the strongest souls in tears. These moments normally revolve around the series’ central concept of the afterlife’s inhabitants being “obliterated” and reborn as soon as they find true peace; rather than presenting a character’s obliteration as the dramatic, over-the-top moment suggested by the word “obliterate”, some excellent direction tends to mean that they just disappear — they’re there in one frame, then the moment the camera angle changes, they’re gone. Simple, beautiful — and often heartbreaking.

I know that some people aren’t a big fan of how the whole series ends and while I agree to a certain extent — the last few episodes are very rushed, and the show both introduces and shows an antagonist the door with alarming rapidity — I found the actual finale to be a wonderful way to wrap up the whole series. Despite the obviously missing content — most notably, a number of main cast members lacking backstories — there was a satisfying sense of closure to the final scenes, and I was both impressed and surprised to note that the show didn’t exactly end up in the place where I thought it was going to go when I first started watching.

And that’s a real strength of the show as a whole. Most things about it start out as a mystery, and you’re given a gradual drip-feed of information as the series progresses. By the end, you feel like you have a good understanding of at least the cast members positioned as the “main” characters; it’s a shame that distinctive secondary characters such as TK (a blonde guy who speaks entirely in Engrish bastardisations of American clichés) remain completely unexplored, however.

I’d love to see a “director’s cut” one day that features the “missing” episodes. I’m not sure it’ll ever happen, even with the show’s good reception and popularity, but it’s certainly a nice possibility.