baby, i will keep this fire burning


The past decade, but especially the last few years, has led to me visiting a lot of "big" media I just never jumped into. It's interesting in that there are some things where I knew everything going in1, nobody ever held back in discussing it (or at least not in public where I picked up most of the details by osmosis). Meanwhile, there are other works I can dig into now and I knew one or two bits, sure, but it keeps blindsiding me and sidestepping my expectations2. Films, sure, it's real easy to just not know anything about a movie save maybe having seen the trailer, but longer works are a pleasant surprise every time.

The only thing keeping me from trying to hunt down more of this is the time commitment. I work on too many shows at this point. It hit me recently that if I hadn't picked up a cheap Anbernic handheld, it would have been nearly a month since I'd last played a game for myself and not as homework for a show... and even with it, most of my exception has been spent on Gronk's Final Fantasy3, a romhack of the original game I've played repeatedly, going back to that NES cart. Hell, I'm only doing Fullmetal because there are incredibly nice reprints of the manga right now, and I can slam through volumes of manga in a variety of places that sitting down with anime is less convenient in, especially in a small house with other people.

The above is just games I've had installed, ready to go at a click, nearly all of them somewhere in the middle4, at least one for a full ten years now, rounding down. There are definitely titles in this bunch where I'm pretty sure they're out of surprises, and yet, I'm "so close" to completing them. I think just by writing this post I'm talking myself into really working on my time management again, until another spiral of self-destruction sends me careening into the weeds and I begin missing deadlines all over again and barely sleeping.

Oh wait oops nope already screwed because of personal pet projects even before I begin lol


  1. I didn't play FFVII until 2016 and let me tell you, there were no shocks left in that sucker.

  2. Fullmetal Alchemist, a series where I'd made a failed attempt at reading the manga during original publication, dropped off in the middle due to lack of interest, and definitely do not remember things at the point I'm stalled at due to most local stores being out of the volumes I need. All I knew was the meme chapter, the sex pest VA, and the movie where one joined the Nazis.

  3. It's actually "Grond's" Final Fantasy, and it's a very good hack, but I keep calling it Gronk's because it's funny and sometimes it makes the people around me twitch a little.

  4. Although there are definitely some real dogshit ones in there which are only still installed because I keep thinking "This debacle is worth writing about and I might as well keep it installed in case I need more screenshots or capture" because I have Content Brain.


You must log in to comment.

in reply to @bustrider's post:

Yeah, there are... maybe two? variants out there right now. I don't know if the paperbacks are still being printed, there were omnibus collections which I run into at some of the bookstores, but the ones I'm going with are the Fullmetal Editions, very high-quality hardcovers that do 1.5 volumes of the old printing on glossy paper which can dip into full color for title pages and the more striking chunks.

Avoid the S-E manga app because I've been told their current digital system has a terrible token-based weird mechanic that makes it a bear to use, AND their uploads of a lot of series are hampered by weird AI censorship that blacks out things which it thinks are horny. Like flesh. I recall being told FMA was one of the wildest series it got nuts on not for the violence, but because it kept thinking people getting artificial limbs were nudity from the shoulders or stumps.