#489

Oh No! Forgot last post was supposed to be list day! List day for my precious, precious readers, to whom I gave solid assurances!

You poor things, to be such worms on my hook. 

There, there. I have arrived, with more lists that you could ever have bargained for.

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Maybe that's a bold claim, maybe I'm here to wreck all your concepts. Guess we find out together.

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video games I have completed lately:

Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII: Reunion (this has to be one of my favorite games ever. I am not kidding. I know a lot of people take issue with a lot of things about it, maybe the PSP version was worse [I think maybe I got to hold a PSP once. Once] but I think it is a masterpiece. Activate my combat mode, bb)

Final Fantasy IV (somehow it just never gets old! I love this stupid story so fucking much)

video games I have started lately but not yet completed:

Final Fantasy XIII (finally! finally. And you know what? Feels good. It really is an amazingly fun game to play. Faults it has, and they vary in gravity from personality to personality, but the game is so great to play and so amazing to look at, and the story is a remarkable thing remarkably told. Playing a bunch of its predecessors in succession has, as I hoped, help me see it in a new light and raised in in my estimation from "fifty percent genius lashed to a pain machine" to "compromised yet sacred vision". This is probably the nex game I will beat, unless it is...)

Final Fantasy V (getting to be pretty close to done with this bad boy--and it was so rad! That sexy, sexy job system. Another bonkers, silly-ass, beautiful, magnificent tale. Music's not as good as IV or VI, but that's ok. The maps are also iconic.)

INSIDE (almost exactly halfway, kinda stuck on some part of a puzzle that as I type this, makes me unsure that it's a puzzle...I should probably fire it up and try something new right now...anyway INSIDE is very very very good, I have a perception that everybody knows that already and they are right)

The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom (taking my sweet time with this one. It's just that, from the moment it started, I didn't want it to be over)

Final Fantasy VI (really liking it, but I'm at the first juncture where the party gets big and then they split it--like in XIII!--and I took a break there)

video games I particularly wish I could play, but can't right now due to reality:

Final Fantasy VII: Remake+Intergrade

Elden Ring

video games whose soundtracks I have been obsessed with/were FINALLY made available

All Final Fantasy games, to varying degrees, the intensity of it might actually be a little embarassing

Eastward (FINALLY FINALLY THE SHEER PLEASURE OF IT)

Kingdom Hearts II

Golden Sun

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild+Skyward Sword

albums I have listened to lately from start to finish for the first time

Soul Supreme | Soul Supreme

#KingButch | Butcher Brown

Zelda: The Themes on Piano | Arcade Player

As It Ever Was, So It Will Be Again | The Decemberists

Fractures+Folding+Flight of the Sparrow | Anderholm

200Xad | Mega Drive

Atom Heart Mother | HARU NEMURI

(Per la) via di casa | La rappresentante di lista

Reaching Fourth | McCoy Tyner Trio

Today and Tomorrow | McCoy Tyner

Plays Pretty | Oscar Peterson

Riverside Profiles: Thelonius Monk

Takin' Off (Expanded Edition) | Herbie Hancock

GUNSHIP (Instrumentals) | GUNSHIP

Syndicate Shadow | Neon Nox

Nocturn | Tonebox

Athletic Progression | Athletic Progression

Vince Guaraldi Trio | Vince Guaraldi Trio

Black Classical Music | Yussef Dayes

Quarantine Sessions | Tom Misch

What Kinda Music | Tom Misch and Yussef Dayes

Quarantena | Tenderlonius

Keys To The City Volume One+Black Radio III (Supreme Edition)+Code Derivation | Robert Glasper

BREAD | Sofi Tukker

A01 | OLDUCT

Symphonie Pacifique | Greg Foat

Black Focus | Yussef Kamaal

Think of One...+Black Codes (From the Underground) | Wynton Marsalis

movies I have watched lately

The Batman

The Boy and the Heron 

Namoo

television programs I have watched some or all of recently, some ongoing

Severance

Adventure Time+Distant Lands+Fionna and Cake (rewatch)

documentaries I have watched recently

Chimp Crazy

The Way Down: God, Greed, and the Cult of Gwen Shamblin

Love Has Won: The Cult of Mother God

(this is kind of a morbid viewing pattern but I guess I just want to understand these types of mindset better)

comics I have read recently

Vattu+Rice Boy+Order of Tales+3rd Voice | Evan Dahm (reread what I had covered then finished Vattu after a couple years away, which allowed time for a complete and a delicious backlog of 3rd Voice to accumulate--this website is among internet's absolute foremost, and has been since Rice Boy's very first strip--reread that and Order of Tales)

Demon's Mirror | Harry Bogosian

Skin Deep | Kory Bing (reread, catchup)

Octopus Pie | Meredith Gran (reread, but there was also a post-covid story I hadn't read yet with [spoiler] some weddings in it)

Buttercup Festival | David Troupes (reread, catchup)

comics I am about to begin and catch up with because I am just now finding out they exist because one misses these things sometimes and just has to live with the pain and fatality of that knowledge

Blikada | C. Spike Trotman

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It is reasonable to ask how I accomplish such a media diet along with sustaining life and keeping house and meeting any number of other temporal demands. In the first place, I am dedicated. Some would say, obsessed to the point of self-sabotage. For I think of myself as a fairly efficient manager of my days and times in certain senses, depending of course on the day and season, and it bears out in terms of how much I get done. The obverse, of course, is what I basically never get done, what I end up crushing into the last minute, the sacrifices and excisions of other activities necessary in order to pursue my many, errant threads. 

But we are all weavers, eh? This is my tapestry, and I put it together my way.

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Guess that wasn't too crazy on the list front. Well, keep an eye out. I don't know what happens next either.

--JL