1338: Educating Everywhere

I watched an episode of Channel 4's docusoap/fly on the wall show Educating Yorkshire earlier and, as I could have predicted, I found it most enjoyable.

You see, despite my unpleasant experiences at the chalkface a few years back, I still find myself interested in the world of education. I find schools to be fascinating places, with their collection of hundreds or even thousands of diverse people thrown together and expected to survive without killing each other. They're a great source of stories, both from the perspective of the teachers and the pupils, and I am constantly fascinated by fiction set in schools. (This explains my love of the following things: Buffy the Vampire Slayer; appalling high school drama movies; slice of life anime; visual novels)

Educating Yorkshire is set up well to tell some of these supposedly real stories, and it tells them well. Over the course of the single episode I watched today, we learned about the school's headteacher and his ideals; the students' attitudes towards him; the "back stories" of two persistent troublemakers; and a few other things besides. Although everything that happened was mundane to the max, these stories were presented in a compelling manner that made them interesting.

One image I absolutely could not get out of my head, though, was how much typical disciplinary proceedings at a school resemble a police interrogation — or at least one as depicted in the media. Before long, I was picturing Cole Phelps from L.A. Noire yelling at a kid ("[DOUBT] You did it, didn't you, you sick son of a bitch!") and pondering if there might be a market for a video game in which you play a teacher and have to investigate these incredibly mundane transgressions.

Well, I'd play it, even if no-one else would. Though given some of the creative interactive experiences we're starting to get today, now, I can't help but feel I might not be alone!

1331: Not That Irish Band

Been a while since I talked anime (relatively speaking, anyway) so, well, here we go.

I finished watching the second season of Haiyore! Nyaruko-san recently and enjoyed it a great deal — perhaps not quite as much as I liked the first season, but certainly enough to regard it very fondly — and have now moved on to a series I've seen a lot of people mention in the past, but have never checked out myself: Clannad.

I know very little about Clannad save for the fact it was originally a visual novel (that, to my knowledge, never received an official English release, nor a complete fan-translation — do please correct me if I'm wrong) and that it was a show with a certain degree of notoriety for being emotional and moving. As those of you who have been following me a while will know, I have a real soft spot for emotionally engaging media, and take a perverse pleasure from works that are genuinely "harrowing" in some way. I liked Corpse Party so much, for example, because I found it genuinely horrifying, disturbing and upsetting — you might think that would make it unappealing, but in my mind it was just a sign that it was achieving exactly what it set out to do. I think fondly of To The Moon because it legitimately made me properly full-on cry at the ending, and I feel the same way about Kana Little Sister. You get the idea.

So I was always going to check out Clannad sooner rather than later, despite knowing next to nothing about it. And after four episodes, I still know next to nothing about it, but I do know enough to talk a little about my first impressions and what I like about it.

Clannad initially appears to be one of the many slice-of-life high school comedy dramas that make up so much of the modern anime landscape. I'm a big fan of this style of thing, so I have no problem with this, but I'm also conscious of the fact that some people don't like it quite so much.

Where Clannad differs from your usual slice-of-life business is in its atmosphere. On the surface, it's the usual sort of high-energy, high-intensity chaos that this type of show is known for, but there's a very peculiar atmosphere overlaid on the top of it all. Specifically, despite the show's initial impression of being colourful, vibrant and full of energy, there's a very clear sense of melancholy about it, too; a feeling of loneliness.

This is partly personified by the character Nagisa, a lonely girl whom the protagonist comes to befriend. Exactly what Nagisa's deal is hasn't quite been revealed yet, but it's clear that she's a sickly girl — she missed a year of school and had to repeat, and in one early episode she just collapses in the rain without explanation. I have the distinct feeling that Things are going to Happen with Nagisa at some point in the series, though exactly what I don't know just yet — and I'm avoiding spoilers like the plague for the moment.

Nagisa isn't the only source of this loneliness, though; occasionally, the show cuts to a seemingly completely incongruous sequence where a young girl lives alone at the end of the world, and ends up building herself a mechanical friend out of junk. I have no idea of the relevance of all this, yet, whether it's real, dream, metaphor or all three, but it's certainly got my attention.

There's not a lot more I can really say about the show as yet, save for the following opinions: 1) The art and animation is gorgeous. 2) Its visual novel roots are obvious, what with the protagonist's recurring encounters with the female leads. 3) It has the most irritatingly catchy ending song ever. (Dango, dango, dango, dango, dango daikazoku!)

More to almost inevitably follow once I've watched a bit more.

1329: Day After

It was the wedding of my good friend James to his good wife Charlotte yesterday — an event which, apparently, had been a very long time coming. (I've only known James for a relatively short period of time and only met Charlotte once or twice, so it felt like a perfectly reasonable amount of time to me, but judging by the jokes in the speeches, it was, as I say, apparently a long time coming.)

In stark contrast to my friends George and Mitu's wedding the other week, which was a vibrant, multicultural affair that must have cost a fucking fortune to put on, James and Charlotte's wedding was a much more traditional British affair: church service, followed by retiring to a stately home for afternoon tea (including an astonishing variety of finger sandwiches and cakes), barn-dancing, a selection of meats (beef, lamb and pork — with crackling) and, of course, various types of booze on tap.

I must confess to having had a little too much to drink yesterday. I don't drink a lot these days, you see — Andie doesn't drink, and I normally join her on that, since the last few times I've drunk I haven't really enjoyed it all that much, and I don't tend to "go out" to occasions that involve imbibing vast quantities of alcohol very often, either. As such, my tolerance is considerably less than it was when I was at university and drinking fairly heavily on a regular basis. This makes me a cheap date, of course, but also means that I have to be somewhat… careful, particularly when strong drinks are involved.

The reception began with some Pimm's, which was flowing pretty freely and getting regularly topped up by some ninja waiters and waitresses — the moment your glass was less than half-full, someone would appear as if from nowhere with a jug and refill it. Pimm's is delicious, too, of course, and so it's perfectly natural to just keep drinking it if it keeps coming.

Then there was champagne during the toasts and speeches. I'm not all that fond of champagne these days, to be honest — not that fond of wine in general, in fact. I had a bit of a "wine phase" at one point, but have since gone off it somewhat so I was rather underwhelmed by the champagne, even though I can probably safely assume — judging by the rest of the day, anyway — that it was probably quite expensive.

Later in the evening came the real killer, though — there were two different types of scrumpy, one of which just looked like orange squash, and the other of which was called "Bee Sting" and looked a bit like elderflower cordial. I tried some of the latter and it's some of the nicest scrumpy I've ever tasted — very sweet, not at all "alcoholic-tasting" — but by golly it had a kick and a half, and you didn't really notice until it was too late. In my case, it was looking up at the stars outside the venue and staggering unsteadily around that made me realise that yes, I was, in fact, a bit pissed. Not overly so — certainly not enough to make me want to take to the dance floor or do anything particularly outrageous — but enough to affect my balance somewhat. I felt all right, though.

That is, until about 2:30 in the morning, when I woke up to an unpleasant feeling and an accompanying mental image of an army advancing on my position. As the army got closer, I started to feel worse, and attempting to distract myself from the encroaching horde only made me pay more attention to it. Eventually, as the sound of marching boots was bearing down on me and mental pikemen started clashing with mental knights, I felt that there was only one real explanation for the battlefield in my head and stomach, and there was probably also only going to be one resolution to, it, too.

I was correct. Afterwards, however, I felt considerably better and have remained pleasantly hangover-free, too. Which is nice.

1328: Saturday Morning Ramblings

Look, I managed to blog in the morning rather than last thing in the evening! This is probably a mistake, as we're supposed to be heading out to a wedding in about half an hour and I still need to have a shower and get dressed, but I have coffee to drink and I shower quickly. Yes, I bloody well do. So there.

In lieu of anything particularly massively exciting happening in the intervening hours since last night and this morning (largely sleeping) I thought I'd mention a peculiar dream I had. It is one of those ones that was very vivid but didn't really make much sense, so as such I found it quite intriguing.

The main gist of it all was that I was using a computer of some description. For some reason, the casing for the computer (which seemed to be some sort of strange hybrid between a desktop and a laptop system) was open, and I could see into it. I dropped a piece of chocolate (I don't know) onto a vent on part of the casing that was still covered, and I could see it was seeping in, so I wanted to do something about it. I opened the case further and saw that there was, for some reason, a screwdriver that had been left inside the machine. Against all of the advice people give you when you're learning about computers, I reached inside to grab it, when…

ZZap!

I felt a slight electric shock, and the display on the screen went what can only be described as "wrong". If you've ever seen what a graphics card with a loose connection does, it was that. Wrong colouring, fuzzy bits, pixels where they shouldn't be. I hastily switched off the computer, removed the screwdriver, gave it a moment and then turned it back on again.

Instead of booting up normally, the computer switched to a second display that invited me to fix the problem with the main screen by drawing straight lines across photographs of walls. Except after I completed the first one, I somehow found myself actually drawing paint lines across a real wall with my big toe. I couldn't make it all the way across one of the walls, so I gave up, turned the computer off and back on again. It went back to having broken graphics, and then I saw a leaflet on the desk explaining the wall-painting thing — it was a piece of software you could install to randomly pop up the wall-painting game randomly whenever you turned your computer on. It had no discernible benefit whatsoever, and certainly couldn't fix a fried graphics card.

I have no idea what all that means. It's probably some sort of metaphor for some sort of dee-seated anxiety or neurosis. But I don't really have time to think about it now. Coffee. Shower. Wedding. Later!

1327: Friday Night Ramblings

Blergh. End of another week and my brain has just pretty much switched off altogether, so you'll forgive me if I indulge in little more than a stream of consciousness for the evening.

Today's been another week that feels like it's dragged a bit. Not sure why, really, because nothing especially out of the ordinary has happened — though that might, in itself, be the cause of the week dragging somewhat. Very little of note has happened, really, though I did my tax return earlier. Tax returns are shit. I am looking forward to not having to do them any more, though I will have to do one more next year to cover the last two months of payment from when I was self-employed. How irritating.

Anyway, you don't want to hear about that. What do you want to hear about? Oh, you can't respond. Never mind, then.

I was idly musing during a quiet moment earlier and had an interesting idea for what I might do for my not-NaNoWriMo month of creative writing this coming November. I'm actually quite pleased with the idea, but as with many of my ideas I find myself wondering if I'll be able to spin it out into a complete story. We'll see. I'm not going to share anything about it for now, but I might actually make a note of it. There are few things more frustrating for a creative type than having a really amazing idea (or at least an interesting idea) and then forgetting to make a note of it anywhere, so that by the time you actually have the time to do something about it, you've completely forgotten the cool thing you were going to do.

Fortunately, over the years I've discovered that I have a pretty good memory for fairly useless crap, including a host of half-finished stories — many of which I've been carrying around in my head since school. I really should actually make an effort and get some of them written; in fact, I have started writing some of them several times — one of them in particular — but often find myself getting a little hung up on the middle bit.

This may sound like a strange thing to get hung up on — surely the beginning and ending are more important? — but it's something that tends to bug me. Often I know where characters are going to start and what the finale is going to be; the difficulty is in determining how they are going to get from one place to the other, because those two places are often very different from one another. Obviously. (Or perhaps not, I don't know.)

Anyway, as you can probably tell, my mind is continually drifting at the moment so I think I'm going to call it a night for now. Andie and I are off to a wedding tomorrow so I almost certainly will be tired out by the evening, which means you can probably expect something similarly stimulating from tomorrow's post, unless I remember to write something in the morning which is, let's face it, based on previous experience, fairly unlikely. (I wish I would remember to write a bit earlier, though; it's nice to be able to wind down for the evening and not have to worry about writing this… though at the same time writing this forms a nice "end point" to the day where I can collect my thoughts before going to sleep.)

Anyway. Yeah. Whatever. Have a good weekend. Good night.

1323: PAX Pox

Another Penny Arcade Expo (aka PAX) is coming to a close, and once again I find myself sorry I wasn't there — though perhaps not quite as sorry as I'd be if I wasn't working in the games press and would not therefore be obligated to, you know, write about stuff if I was actually there.

That said, attending an event like PAX as a professional is pretty exciting, too — though for different reasons to if you're going as a "civilian". I haven't covered a PAX as a professional since I've worked full-time in the biz, but I did attend a Gamescom for GamePro a couple of years back, and that was oddly thrilling. It was also completely exhausting due to the fact that I'd spend all day zipping between appointments and all night writing up the things I learned in said appointments, leaving approximately three hours for sleeping per night — no, I didn't do any socialising whatsoever, but you know me; that was, to be honest, absolutely fine by me.

Gamescom is a bit of a different setup to PAX, though — at least in my limited experience having attended one of each. While PAX is a sprawling consumer show that occupies convention halls, theatres and corridors, and at which you generally have to make some very tough decisions about whether to wait in line to see panels and/or concerts or actually brave the show floor, Gamescom has a very clear divide between the "consumer" bit and the "trade" bit.

The "consumer" part of the Gamescom I attended was even more chaotic than PAX. Several huge halls of the Kölnmesse were devoted to the event, and for some reason the organisers seemed to think that turning the lights down low would be a really good idea. The floor of all the exhibition halls was literally (yes, I mean literally) carpeted with discarded flyers and other rubbish, and it was noisy, crowded and difficult to get around.

Contrast with the "trade" part, which was over on the opposite side of the Kölnmesse, and was the complete opposite — in fact, much more what I expected from a games industry show, based on my extremely limited experience from attending ECTS once back in the '90s. A sense of calm; companies showing their products privately in booths, many of which had refreshments and comfortable chairs; a feeling of organisation rather than chaos. (Much more stereotypically German, to put it another way.) I vastly preferred the "trade" side of things, because it meant I got to see lots of cool stuff without having to fight my way through hordes of people who just wanted to stare at other people playing League of Legends on a big screen. This was largely because I had appointments to see specific people in the trade bit, whereas the consumer bit was pretty much a free-for-all.

That said, on balance I think I preferred my trip to PAX East to my professional engagement at Gamescom. At Gamescom I didn't feel like I was "at home" or "among friends", largely because I was just there to do a job and didn't really have time to enjoy anything. At PAX East, meanwhile, I was among friends — many of whom I was meeting in person for the first time after many years of communicating on the Internet — and I had a real sense of "belonging"; of being among people who understood the same things I was passionate about.

One day I'll make it back, and I'll make a point of making some time to hang out with cool people. Until that happens, though, I'll just have to gaze jealously from a distance at each PAX that comes and goes — and at my friends and colleagues who attend them.

1321: My Blog Post Can't Be This Cute

I thought I hadn't written about OreImo before, but apparently I have, and with almost the same title as this post, too. Oh well. I'm going to write about it again, then I'm going to watch the last two episodes that are disappearing from Crunchyroll at 9pm PT this evening, because I'm hooked.

OreImo, or, to give it its full title that I have to look up every time, Ore no Imouto ga Konna ni Kawaii Wake ga Nai (My Little Sister Can't Be This Cute) is a really interesting show that wasn't at all what I expected it was going to be, and it made that fact abundantly clear within a few moments of it starting. I was expecting some sort of lighthearted slice-of-life anime with a long-suffering male protagonist dealing with the wacky behaviour of his moe moe little sister. Instead, what I got was an intriguing exploration of a number of interesting characters, and a genuinely surprising story that I found hard to predict — not in the sense that it was chaotic, but in that I was never quite sure which direction they were going to take it.

I'll refrain from posting spoilers here in case you're intending to watch it, but suffice to say it explores a number of interesting themes: what it means to be an otaku; dealing with the conflict between your public persona and your "true self"; what it means to confide in someone; the nature of true friendship; and the fickleness of teenage love. There is also an undercurrent of "will they, won't they" incestuousness, which makes some people uncomfortable, but having watched (nearly) the whole series now I'm firmly convinced that this feeling of discomfort is entirely deliberate. I shall say no more on the matter for now.

The characters involved are all interesting to explore, too. The protagonist Kyousuke is a late-teens guy who clearly thinks he's going nowhere, and appears to be quite depressed about it as a result — along with the fact that, at the outset of the series, his relationship with his little sister Kirino appears to be broken beyond repair. The two series then unfold as he tries to repair the rift between them by attempting to understand her and her tastes a little better.

It's not just a two-hander, though — there are others involved, too, and they each have interesting roles to play. Kuroneko, for example, is a character even more obsessed with anime culture than Kirino is, and appears to live her life in a constant delusion that she actually is one of her favourite manga characters — or at the very least, puts across that impression in order to escape from reality. Saori, another "otaku" character that Kirino gets to know early in the series, is also escaping from reality, but for different reasons — to explain why, however, would be a spoiler, so I'll refrain from talking further.

At the other end of the spectrum is Ayase, Kirino's supposed best friend and someone who is not at all sympathetic to otaku culture and tastes. Seeing Ayase struggle to come to terms with the truth about her best friend — and her feelings for Kyousuke, for that matter — is one of the more interesting parts of the show. Plus she's kind of a badass, too.

It's nearly 1am here, but I have a couple of episodes to watch before sleep if I'm going to catch them before they're gone, so I'm out of here. Good night!

1320: Anime After Hours

I started a new anime discussion community over on Google+. You can find it here. If you're wondering why I chose Google+, the most-frequently-ridiculed-by-people-who-have-never-used-it social network on the Internet, it's because Google+'s Community tools are both really good and extremely simple to use, with unnecessary fluff kept to a minimum. Also, it's ad-free, which is lovely.

Anyway, my thinking behind creating the Anime After Hours community, as it's called, was relatively simple. There are a number of anime communities on G+ already, but the vast majority of them tend to end up doing the same things: posting pictures without context (usually with at least one commenter yelling at the poster to remember to put a source in their post); asking the same simplistic questions over and over again; playing tagging and meme games; and only discussing the most popular, mainstream titles.

This is all fine, of course; it's great that there are active communities that allow people to discuss the mainstream side of anime — stuff like Naruto, Pokémon and the like — and that are friendly to the younger end of the market. But, as any anime fan who's looked a little deeper into the medium will know, there's a lot more going on than just Naruto. A lot of anime is aimed at more mature audiences; late teens at the earliest, grown adults in some cases. And I'm not just talking about ecchi or hentai adult content; I'm also talking about shows that take in mature subject matter, or which are violent, or which kids simply wouldn't get.

As I watch more and more anime series and find myself discovering the things I like, I was becoming more and more conscious of the fact that there was a serious dearth of places for people around my age to discuss the medium — it's difficult to be heard in the rapid posts of G+'s more popular anime communities, for example, and they're not saying anything particularly interesting anyway. As such, Anime After Hours was designed as a place for people to come and discuss their favourite anime, whatever form that might take. It's an inclusive community that will accept anyone, on the understanding that it's a community for talking and discussing, not for superficialities. Already there's 13 members, which isn't that much, but we've started kicking off some interesting discussions — and I'm sure as (if?) more people roll in, the community will become more active.

So consider this your invitation, dear reader; if you're the slightest bit interested in anime and you've been looking for a place to come and discuss the medium free of Naruto-loving kids, you know where to come. All you need is a Google account.

See you there?

1319: The Fine Art of Working from Home Without Going Mental

The title of this post would probably suggest that I am something more of an authority on this subject than I actually am, but I do at least have the benefit of experience to draw from when talking about this.

Working from home may sound like an absolute dream come true, but it can be surprisingly challenging, particularly from a motivational perspective. I'm fortunate in that I like my job and enjoy doing it; if I was doing something less enjoyable like, say, the audio typing for insurance companies that I did for one dark summer, I'd probably be feeling less positive about things.

That's not to say that even with a job you enjoy, working from home isn't fraught with distractions from all angles, ranging from something as simple as a desire to go and get yet another coffee to the myriad procrastination tools The Internet offers.

I think the most difficult thing to deal with, though, is the fact that there's no-one else around. I'm not a particularly "social" person, as you know, and struggle with small talk, especially with people I don't know all that well. However, that's not to say that I don't necessarily enjoy company; on the few occasions I've been down to the Eurogamer offices in Brighton, I've enjoyed being around other people doing the same things I'm doing, even if most of them spent most of the day with headphones on, immersed in their own work. It was nice to just be around others, and to be able to jump in to occasional conversations.

In order to counter the loneliness thing, I often make a point of going out, even if it's just to the local coffee shop. (I've been there so often now that the staff recognise me, though I've stymied their attempts to pigeon-hole me with a "usual" by regularly ordering different drinks.) I find that it's quite pleasant to change environment and do some work with other people around, even if I don't have anything to do with them directly. There's just a nice atmosphere; a sense of comfort, of not being alone. Weird, I know, but true.

It's not an ideal situation, of course — it's over half a mile of walking to get to said coffee shop, and then when I'm there I'm expected to, you know, actually buy something, which costs money, but eh. I can take the rough with the smooth.

Perhaps what I should actually do is open up a coffee shop in my living room so there can be people milling around at all times while I do my work. But that sounds like an awful lot of effort, frankly.

Eh. There's no easy answer, and I'm not sure I'm even looking for an "answer" — I think, on balance, I'd rather be doing what I'm doing from home than feeling my life slowly being sucked out of me by a traditional office job.

I'll leave you with this Mitchell & Webb sketch, which pretty much sums things up rather nicely.

1317: Never Gonna Dance Again

We went to a wedding today — that of our friends George and Mitu — and it was a pretty spectacular affair. Given their respective families' diverse cultural and religious backgrounds (civil ceremony, followed by Islamic blessing, plus traditional Bengali and Ukrainian ceremonies, plus some Greek dancing somewhere along the way), there was a hell of a lot going on all day. I wouldn't expect anything less from this particular couple; one of many complimentary things I can say about them is that they certainly don't do things by halves.

As the evening session got underway, though, I found myself becoming contemplative, specifically with regard to the matter of dancing. I have never been a particularly good dancer, though when I first started university all it generally took to actually get me on the dance floor was a few vodka and Red Bulls. These days, though… I just can't do it. I can't bring myself to do it at all, and I find that fact a little distressing.

It's not that I particularly want to dance, see — I think dancing is, on the whole, one of the more ridiculous things the human race has decided is a good way to spend its time — but it's more the wider picture: over the last few years I've become very conscious of the fact that I find it very difficult to outwardly express joy in any form, whether that's simply through saying something positive, "acting" excited or doing something typically associated with joyfulness like, say, dancing.

The precise reasons for this state of mind elude me somewhat, though I have more than a few suspicions that it's something to do with either or both of the two related issues that are depression and self-esteem. Whenever I feel like I'm being "pressured" to act excited or joyful, I just clam up and feel horribly embarrassed; like if I do outwardly display some form of excitement or joy, people will immediately call it out for being "fake" or something. Perhaps "fake" isn't the right word; it just doesn't feel "right" to do or express these things. I can't quite pin down if it's a sense of feeling like I don't "deserve" to feel these things — I don't think it's that — or whether it's just a sense of embarrassment at being anything other than the stony-faced dude in the corner of the room.

I think it's also something to do with social pressure. I have no problem with being excited when I'm by myself (ooer) and, as regular readers will note, I also have no problem with expressing excitement for something via the medium of the written word. But place me in a situation where I'm supposed to be acting excited? I can't do it. I feel like people are judging me and will somehow not believe that I'm happy or excited if I don't do it "enough" — ironically, though, this often makes me do some sort of half-hearted Fluttershy-style "yay" rather than genuinely act excited, which probably leads to the exact issue I'm afraid of.

(Incidentally, that whole "yay" scene with Fluttershy is absolutely, positively, 100% the reason why I love that show so much. I absolutely am her, in more ways than one.)

Sooooo. Yeah. If something cool happens to you, that's great. I really am happy for you. If I don't appear to be showing it on my face, however, it's nothing personal. It's just the way I am.

Yay.