Digitally Staving Off Boredom

Has it been a week already?  Time flies when you're backed into a corner of your own home, desperately taking additional work hours in order to afford to escape drowning in clutter, cohabitating with a willful bipolar whose new marijuana IBS "cure" has great potential to make him even less stable in the future, and being promised without consent as a reward to entertain a younger grade schooler because why would I ever need more time to myself?
I guess this is my lot in life until I can afford a nice bunker of my own to hide in, but I hope my family is not too surprised if I never want to see them again after this treatment.

Procrastination-wise, I have little new to report:
Mechwarrior Online remains an easy commitment.   After logging in, I enter a cycle where I choose a mech, engage in a 10-15 minute bit of big stompy robot vehicular combat, go to the mechlab, tweak my mech, and repeat.  There's insufficient long-term point to this for it to be worth my time, but t…

Sorry for the late update.  Truth be told, it's been a reasonably miserable week for me. 

Real Life: Running Interference:

The younger sister came down with the nephew and niece.  Bless them, but I just did not have time for them this weekend.  Poor little guy got barely two or three hours with his uncle, after I returned from work, before he had to go back up north.  It was spent in Minecraft and I also showed him a little Mechwarrior Online, which he thought was cool.  Heaven forbid the poor guy try playing it alone with a bunch of cranky strangers, though.

The younger brother decided to celebrate 4/20 day by taking up smoking weed using a vaporizer.  No need to call the cops, we live in one of the few states where you can openly buy recreational weed in stores.  It has still been a nightmare for me because I am not a smoker, I never wanted to live in a house with a smoker, but he's brought the habit into our home.

Even though vaporizers are supposed to generate n…

This bizarro weekend has been utterly consumed by MechWarrior Online.   I remember seeing PC Gamer raving about this late 2013-released game for quite some time, but this is the first time I played it.  I had been avoiding it because my Battletech roots are in the ancient MUSH I played back when I was a teenager, real time but completely textual versions of the game, which made me come to understand enough of the original board game rules to know that MechWarrior Online stomps all over it with big robot feet.

My main hangup was that armor balance is ruined by giving pinpoint accuracy to players.  The board game rules split armor into eleven separate sections and all the armor of all the original mech designs were balanced in mind that weapons will impact them at random.  Most MechWarrior computer games allow players to pinpoint accuracy to shoot certain sections, eliminating the randomness, making the armor simulated by the original rules practically useless!  It is so bad that Mec…

It is common for a mangaka (manga author) to get intricately involved in the subject matter of their comic.  However, what if the comic is about the performing arts themselves?  After all, the very goal of acting is to weave a compelling illusion for the benefit of its viewers, the same as a manga.  The effect should be magnifying.

So goes my theory as to why Skip Beat! is as fantastic as it is.  It is one of the more foremost shojo mangas in existence, still ongoing from its 2002 origins to today with rave reviews and an international readership.

Of course, I am here to talk mostly of the anime.  It aired in 2008 and relatively faithfully reproduces the happenstances in the manga from chapters 1 to 66.  (So faithfully that I find myself backsliding to talking about the manga by accident.)  Weighing in at 25 episodes, the anime was produced by Hal Film Maker.  Currently, Skip Beat!can be seen on Crunchyroll.

The story is centered on 16-year-old Kyoko Mogami, our leading lady and prota…

The latest anime to fall off the end of my procrastination is MoonPhase (a.k.a Tsukuyomi: Moon Phase), which is basically a cute comedy with some romance centered on an adorable little pure-blood vampire named Hazuki.  However, despite enjoying it enough to give it a 9 out of 11, I am afraid there is not a whole lot to say about it.

Hazuki is a vampire princess, 14-years-old, walled away from the world for evil-knows-what reasons.  (There is something about overpowering her innocent personality with an implanted evil personality, known as Luna.)  Since Hazuki has been in isolation since she was very young, she does not have much in the way of manners, but she is understandably very lonely beneath that cute but bratty exterior of hers.  Being a vampire, she sucks blood once a full moon. What can I say? Japan loves their lolitas, and a vampire status is as effective an obfuscating excuse for that as any.

Kouhei Morioka is a 21-year-old photographer who can only get commissions working fo…

The Spatials has recently made a Steam release.  Despite being cheaply priced and put together by a two-man team, what was delivered is a time-consuming experience with not all that bad of an entertainment return.  However, there are a few chinks in its armor that leave me wishing the developers gave it another month.

The greatest feature of The Spatials is that it is essentially four games in one, seamlessly integrated and running simulaniously in real time for as long as you run the game.
The space station building part.  Top-down, isometric perspective, empire building game.

This is a fairly rudimentary Dwarf Fortress clone, not as sophisticated as that game, but then, Dwarf Fortress is a labyrinthine mess of sophistication, so I can hardly fault the developers of The Spatials for simplifying and streamlining everything behind an extremely user-friendly GUI.The universe-exploring part.  Top-down, isometric perspective, real-time squad combat game.

Choose a planet to explore and, onc…

For April Fool's day this year, I am going to talk a bit a miserable failure to finish my most recent anime.  In earlier versions of the previous entry about Chobits, I mentioned moving on to Mahoromatic next, as it seems a logical progression in the whole romantic-comedies-heading-in-the-direction-of-robot-girls schtick I seemed to be up.   I have since removed mention of Mahoromatic from the entry.  Surprise!

What happened?  Gainex happened.  This studio is somewhat infamous for weird reinterpretation decisions and sometimes gratuitous fanservice.  Their treatment of making the Mahoromatic manga into a anime thoroughly repelled me, to the point where I simply could not continue past halfway through season 1.

A short summary then:
Suguru Misato is a geeky (130 IQ) junior high student everyboy living in Tokyo, alone, because his parents are dead.  A decent fellow, he does not succumb to the cheesecake he is regularly subjected to, but that is about all I can say about him.Mahoro …