Forcing myself to type this month's update now since I'm extremely lazy and have my hands full this week. I considered writing another post earlier this month, talking about some specific things I had in mind, but, once again, I'm lazy and said things ended up drifting away from my thoughts.
Well, anyway, August. Following on last month's news, I'm now not a teacher anymore. Leaving was a half-calculated, half-impulsive decision I took, so I won't lie, I got pretty nervous about it for the better part of the month. Financially-wise. Rationally, I know I'd be okay anyway because of my savings, but, y'know, I do freelance work and I'm not at a stage where I have a huge array of clients sending me their requests, so, emotionally, my brain was in worry mode.
Thankfully, I can now safely say I do not regret my decision, since these last two weeks of August have been very productive, more so than usual. That's in part thanks to starting, as I mentioned last log, to work with dub translation. I will say dub translation takes way more time and it can be very tiring, but I think I'm getting the hang of it, and it can even be satisfying at times. The show I'm working on sucks, the fact it's unscripted sucks even more, but I'm very grateful to finally begin doing this kind of job. This is probably not that interesting but I don't have that much going on so bear with me.
Outside of work, I went to the dentist for the first time in years and I only bring this up, first of all, because going to the dentist sucks a lot. I didn't even do any complicate procedures or anything, but I got reminded how awful it is. To think I was used to that at some point. Now, the other reason I mention the dentist is because, on my way to the clinic, I decided to start reading in Japanese again! This is big! I got inspired by a friend who's really going all in in studying Japanese, and so I decided to just start again. For those who don't know, I studied Japanese before, twice in my life; the first time, while I was in high school, for around one or two years before I let a random guy in a podcast convince me kanji are hell and more trouble than it's worth it (they're not if you know what you're doing); the second time was… I think not long after that podcast incident, and my studies lasted 2 years, until late-2020, when I got burned out by too much time on Anki flashcards and because my job was stressing and tiring me out. During that second run, I'd read a full visual novel (Kindred Spirits on the Roof, cute little yuri ghost VN) using a text hooker, and managed to read a manga (the first part of Kageki Shoujo). My last attempt was trying to read the Keiko Takemiya classic sci-fi series Toward the Terra, which was the third secret reason for my giving up studies, since the scans for that are not great and I couldn't read the furigana. Today, I still haven't read it, so it remains a sort of Holy Grail to me, which is why I decided to start with that one. Now I know how to look up kanji radicals, which makes my life way, way easier, and I'm having a great time! Turns out I have enough about the language internalized that pages with simpler vocabulary/conversations are a breeze to get through, and that's a very satisfactory feeling. Even the tougher parts, particularly the sci-fi world exposition, are fun as well, once I look up all the kanji meanings and grammar and manage to read it as a cohesive sentence. So yeah, study languages, it's really cool, and please do not fall for the “but it's so hard!” talk like I did, as long as you're having fun.
Speaking of manga in Japanese, the Japanese shop Suruga-ya has opened free shipping campaigns three times this month, in which two I bought Japanese second hand manga. It's actually insane how expensive it is to ship manga to Brazil usually, so this deal was very, very productive to me. I'll talk more about what I ordered once they arrive, but I will say it's pretty much all old shoujo and some stuff I've wanted for a good while, so I'm really pleased.
That's all the most relevant stuff I can recall for now, so I'll go for the media highlight section.
Movies: First of all, I absolutely need to talk about Shinya Tsukamoto's Tokyo Fist and Hiruko the Goblin. The first is a super intense boxing movie (I guess a horror boxing movie?) that feels like I guess whatever anxiety you can think about feeling. It's visceral, violent, and the sort of visual insanity you'd expect from the director of Tetsuo: The Iron Man. Hiruko is more normal in comparions, but it's a lot of fun, a more traditional horror in the vein of something like Evil Dead, with some wonderful practical effects (PUPPET! SPIDER! MONSTERS!), dynamic camera movements, and a lot of blood.
Speaking about intense things, after William Friedkin's passed away, I saw his movie Sorcerer, which is just… holy shit. It's the kind of thing that makes your jaw drop and I need to show it to some people just to see their reactions in real time. Great stuff, may Friedkin rest in peace.
Anime: Haven't been watching much, but the biggest one is I've finished Patalliro! I've talked about it before, but it became a recent favorite, grew on me a lot since I started it months ago, on the strength of its visuals and charming characters. To sum things up, it's essentially a gag manga like they used to do in the 1980s, but it also has James Bond-style spy plots featuring Bancoran and Maraich, two openly gay spy boyfriends and my favorite pretty boy couple. It's a hard sell due to its sense of humour (I kinda like it but some might find it annoying), but I'd say it's worth a look if you like the idea of explicitly gay James Bond and can appreciate old school, surreal comedy manga. I'm always taking the chance to recommend it of course.
The other thing I've been watching is Brain Powerd, which I haven't manage to finish yet, but it's quickly becoming a favorite, too. I think you need to be used to Yoshiyuki Tomino's style before getting into it? It might come across as stupid or incomprehensible otherwise. The show had the unfortunate reputation of I guess Evangelion clone? That's how I first heard about it at least, since it came in the early-90s and Eva was all the English-speaking otaku knew about as far as robots go. I'm pleased to say it's wonderful, maybe Tomino's finest work. A raw, unfiltered burst of emotions every single episode, quite literally as everyone is constantly screaming about their families and the Earth. However, behind that intensity (I guess that's the theme today), it's very touching and legit beautiful, as love for Earth and life is at the center of its narrative and is the strongest power in the world. I might talk about it again once I'm done with the show.
Comics: Not “manga” this time, as I have read Watchmen recently. It's rare for me to venture into American comics, but I liked this one quite a bit. Everybody knows about it, so I won't talk about it in length, but I liked the politically, apocalyptic, tense atmosphere at every page and especially how those pages looked. Some great, iconic panneling and vibrant colors in there. Easy to see why it's so influential.
Lastly, I'm currently reading Shuninta Amano's yuri manga Philosophia. I started it right when this week's flood of work began, so I didn't manage to finish it yesterday, but it's short and really good so far, so here's my shoutout. It features college girls who smoke, which kinda reminded me that smoking looks pretty sexy and cool, so it's a real shame that in real life it smells so bad and kills people. Ah, well, nevertheless, one of them lights her cigarette using the flame of the other's cigarette, which is so, so good. I need to get more into yuri in the future.
Games: I nearly closed this without mentioning I've been obsessing over Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne. People did not lie, what a game. Earlier this year I played through the Digital Devil Saga duology, which was also great, and it helped to prepare me for Nocturne, so I'm not having such a tough time as expected. Of course, the game's challenging, but not a nightmare (not frequently anyway), and I love having to prepare to fight a specially tough boss or something like that, thinking about weaknesses and resistances, thinking about what course of action to take in battle etc. because I'm a nerd. Who would've guessed fusing demons would be such a blast to me?
Well, that's it for this month. Have a nice September!