Lately, on account of not having classes or important business meetings with the lizard people who secretly rule the world (e.g. Gex from hit video game Gex), I've fallen into a routine of peaceful day to day life, only ever interrupted by that one nightmare I had the other night in which I could hear the frantic thumping of the footsteps of a man making a mad dash for his life in the hallway outside of my door. That was a bit harrowing.
While peace on its own is good and all, it's also good to have a routine. That way you having something to root for. And getting into the habit of furthering the endeavours you wish to further will get you further through them than otherwise, without further ado.
Rather than what I'd call a routine, though, I have what I like to refer to as "quotas" that I strive to meet every day. See, I like the word quota. It reminds me of The Escapists, where during Work Period you've gotta fulfill your work quota, indicated by a bar at the bottom right of the screen.* It also reminds me of the line from the bridge to the dubious song "Touch Fluffy Tail" by Ken Ashcorp, which simply reads: "But I still got my quota." And in response I can't help but think to myself: "Yeah! That's true! I DO have my quota!" Though for the record I can't say I find the rest of the song as relatable. What's a "shota"?
Overflow of nerd stuff from the prior post aside, let's see what a day in the life of ol' Not Billison (as I call my online blog-persona, even though my real name is actually Cornelius Gartholemew Odilie) looks like, quota-wise.
First I wake up. That part's important. I know something's wrong if I don't do that. Then I mill about a bit, and now I realize that I should really just list my quotas since detailing my entire daily routine would not only be tiresome, but would reveal to the world that I spend an embarrassingly long amount of time burying corpses.
My designated quotas, as of this writing, are as follows: Japanese flashcards, piano, and drawing. Usually I get the former done right at the start of the day, the middle done 'round noon, and the latter sometime in the evening. And in between I play games or whatever other nonsense I get up to these days, like writing stupid blog posts, and explaining to the local authorities that I was only joking when I said online that I'm burying corpses.
So, regarding the first of the quotas: I'm going through two sets of flashcards right now, since two is a bigger number than one. They're just the sets from that Seth dude's Genki Study Resources website, one for vocab and the other for kanji. I've actually gone through all the kanji by now, though, so I'm just making new cards for that every day for important characters that will no doubt be useful to me at some point, such as those in the lyrics to the opening song to 2002 magical girl anime Tokyo Mew Mew. I've also been thinking I should start learning the kanji used in the dialogues in Touhou 11. Surely that'd be easier than figuring out how to apply an English patch.
Also, despite having reached its end over half a year ago now, I still here and there keep up reviewing the cards from the JLab beginner deck, 'cos the extra bit of listening comprehension testing is nice. That's because I'm actually a fake anime fan who doesn't watch anime every single day. Yeah, sorry. I've been leading you all on. Though I guess if I actually want to finish those notable thrillers I'm watching, like Death Note and Non Non Biyori, I should watch more often...
Moving on, piano's nice. I had a number of edgy phases back when I was younger where I hated piano, would get super frustrated over it, and wanted to quit. However, I've since grown as a person, and to be clear not as a lizard-person, and have lately been practicing daily. I'd not been in the habit back when class was in session this year, as I was too busy doing other things such as lamenting existence, but have since gotten back into it, admittedly spurred by the DDLC+ Side Stories.** Sorry, what I meant to say is: admittedly spurred by, uh, football! Yeah!
Piano's also nice as it's pretty easy to find sheet music to songs from games and anime I like. Most pertinently, perhaps, I've recently been learning an arrangement of the song graveyard (not capitalized) from the ENA: Dream BBQ soundtrack. Love that song. I even Cobalted an hour-long looped version of it, just 'cos the release version of the song doesn't loop well on its own. Should probably actually buy the album it's on at some point, though, to properly support the artist.
Speaking of Dream BBQ: darn good game. It shadowdropped the other month just as I'd finished reading Shimeji Simulation, which was a darn good manga***. Out of the frying pan and into the fire, it was, and in this case "fire" refers in a positive manner to the quality of both media pieces. (As does the frying, of course.)
Aw man but speaking of piano, I'm still peeved that somehow the illustrious members of my household, in this case probably just my sister, managed to misplace something like 10 pages of my sheet music. Most I could reprint, so it was somewhat fine, but some of those pages were the photocopies of Chopin's Waltz Op. 69 No. 2 my piano teacher had made for me, and which had on them all the annotations from when I was learning it, and which would be mighty helpful to have for my maintaining of the song.
Oh well. No use crying over spilled milk, or I guess milk that belonged to you which somebody else carelessly misplaced and then forgot about. I just wish that somebody else would also do her own dishes more often, and stop leaving empty cans of Perrier around the house like some kind of cartoon alcoholic.
Sorry, that got a little personal. I just wanted to showcase a bit of my human side, in order to convince you that I am not, in fact, one of the lizard people who secretly rule the world. (e.g. Gex from hit video game Gex.)
Finally, my third daily quota is that of drawing. I'm not very good, but, like, well, that's why I'm trying to practice. I happen to have a bunch of little humourous dialogue ideas stored in a txt titled "4Koncepts" for presumably 4-paneled komics****. Maybe one day I'll draw out a couple and put 'em on my website somewhere. That'd be cool and retro.
Now, it could be a nice change of pace to have an image plastered unto one of these blog posts, to help with audience retention. So I'll scan something presentable (I'm a rich fellow who not only owns a yaght but also a scanner.) and put it below this paragraph. Pardon me if it ain't DiCaprio-level.
To clarify, that is indeed Tamao Suzumi from 2006 yuri anime Strawberry Panic depicted holding some kind of pistol. (As well as Chito from Girls' Last Tour, and I guess some other chick too.)
And to further clarify, I indeed have only taken up drawing so that I can save images of cute clothing models onto my laptop under the pretence that they are reference images. This is because I am not only a creep, but a weirdo as well.
What the hell am I doing here?
Anyway, that about concludes my discussion upon these quotas. It's nice to have these goals to hit every day, otherwise I'd feel like I'm whittling away my time, doing nothing. Well, nothing but playing games and explaining my silly self-incriminations to the local authorities. Though on the other hand, the completion of my game backlog is something I'd consider a long-term goal of mine...
Besides the trio of items mentioned here, there are other things I try to hit here and there. I hit a little workout routine every two days as extra precaution against the very real threat of rigor mortis setting in. And there and here I make sure to work on music, or as I like to call it, "Billison." As in, I refer to a session of composing, or recording and so on for my music project as time spent "Billisoning." The term's caught on amongst every member of my band. Though admittedly, I'm a one-man band.
Well, now that I've mentioned Billison, I can feel justified in plugging my latest demo, a little something I cooked up the other day. I'll put an audio embed containing it below this paragraph, 'cos that'd be cool and retro. Though here's a Soundcloud link as well if you're into that, I guess. I for one ain't. Too many "Promote your music!" bots on that platform, and they don't even bother to make it look as if they've actually listened to your track. I poured my heart and soul into this composition, you know.
If you're a real gamer, you might notice that the bass line is heavily inspired by the title screen theme from The Escapists. My brother actually noticed that, meaning that even he's a real gamer, even if instead of playing visual novels he's cracked at Minecraft.
Man, I should get back into The Escapists. I had a bit of trouble with becoming too perfectionist in my gameplay, though. I'd reset days slightly more often than I perhaps should, in order to get better desk and shop RNG and so on. It is the optimal move at times, but doing it too much gets a bit tiresome...
Speaking of tiresome, this sure has been a long blog post. I should wrap it up in a sec here. I could be hitting my gaming backlog right now, or going out for a walk since it's a nice day outside. Yeah, sorry for leading you all on in regards to that too. I'm not a real gamer. I go outside.
Let's see, has this blog post hit its quota in regards to each topic? I've gone over my daily quotas, thrown in some images, and plugged my latest track. That's pretty good.
I think I also wanted to mention that, like quasi-quotas, I play my favoured online games of Splatoon (3) and Dominion pretty often. Gotta grind that elo!!! Will probably type up a blog post in regards to my experience with Dominion in a couple weeks, when I start the next season of league.
Though I'm taking a bit of break from both those games for today, or at least for most of today, because I simply had to write this stupid blog post. My loyal fans depend on me, you know?
In any case, this is Not Billison who, indeed, is not a real anime fan, nor a real gamer, and ideally not deemed a real serial killer by the jury's verdict, signing off.
*Admittedly, had to look up gameplay to check this. Been awhile since I'd played. And was initially under the impression that the positioning of the bar is different between the PC and console versions of the game, but I was mistaken; in both it's at the bottom right.
**Peak fiction, as the say, by the way. I'll die on that hill. I'll admit it's a bit of a shame, though, that such good stories have a bit of a barrier to entry, so to speak. That is, that of being based. In other news, finished my reread of them the other day, which is why I can say with certainty that they're great. But now I need to go back to playing the original game for the sake of 100% completion...
***Written by Tsukumizu, the author of Girls' Last Tour, which was also a darn good manga, and anime. Highly recommend.
****From what I've seen if German, this is probably comics in German. Speaking of German (though not in German) besides the usual anime nonsense have been listening to some German rock lately, though not Rammstein. Rather, the band called Baumann Bergmann Pokinsson. Not 100% on the former two, but I know the later to be "Poki" of Daedalic games, who while notorious for their screw-up with that Gollum game, have a nifty catalogue of point-and-clicks, my favourite of which being Edna & Harvey: Harvey's New Eyes. In fact, as I type this I happen to be listening to Nadel und Faden Orchesterversion from that game's soundtrack. Hey, while I'm talking about music, here's a link to my Spotify playlist of songs I've been listening to the most lately, such as when drawing. It has the mild theme that the songs are in pairs, and the more prominent theme of being in impeccable taste.