Bouncy castle, a Lego build and Children's Day - W18

Obligatory May The 4th Be With You, by the way. Another week is over, I am still wearing my pajamas and enjoying a day off, which makes this Monday one of the best Mondays of the year thus far. Zero complaints!

Here’s a question, when was the last time you actually just played like a kid? something like tag, or with toys and such? I did some fun stuff this week that made me feel twelve again, it was awesome. It was Children’s Day in Mexico on April 30th, so I guess it makes sense.

• 🧱 Had some time to assemble a Lego set! The Time Machine from Back to the Future!, I documented my progress on my polymaths profile, in case you want to see more pics.

• 🥳 A friend of mine had a birthday party, and the highlight of the event was a bouncy castle! Most of the time people our age aren’t allowed to get into those, but this was exclusively for grown-up kids like me. We played for actual hours and all of my joints ended up kinda bruised and burned the next day. But it was absolutely worth it. I am really happy to have had that experience again. We played tag and similar games and ended up very tired, so fun!

• 🐻 A while ago Syl made a pixel bear for me! This was such a fun and unexpected gift to receive, but I hadn’t showed it off anywhere on my site yet. You can now find it on my footer section! Thank you again Syl, it’s a lovely gift. I also took it upon myself to make a few more pixel bears for other friends of mine, this is still work in progress though.

• 🛠️ As I added the pixel bear I also finally added the Bubbles widget to the bottom of my posts! Now you can access my post from there and see how many upvotes I have, kinda cool :P

• 🛍️ My parents returned from their short trip and brought back some epic stuff for me, I got two shirts from Avatar (my sister who they visited, picked them for me) and I am enamoured by the Appa one.

• 🏕️ My church rented a quinta (a sort of ranch/country house where parties, weddings, quinceañeras and similar small events are held, often away from the city) for a day, to baptize a few new members of the congregation and celebrate Children’s Day at the same time! After the ceremonies, most families stayed to have lunch and enjoy the day, away from everything and enjoying the pool.

• 🚲 For some reason… I have been interested on maybe acquiring a new bike and actually pedalling to places. I should find a used bycicle somewhere and get to it, I wonder if my shape is good enough for that, to be honest, but I want to try.

• 🃏 I didn’t get in the pool myself, but I brought a bunch of card games, from Exploding Kittens, to Coup, to a pretty try-hard session of Skull and a pretty competitive run of Oh Hell! we also played your typical Spoons and Cheat. Seriously fun stuff when we got 6 or 7 players in many of these.

• 🏀 During a break from card games I went to a small basketball court in the quinta, playing turns throwing the ball into the basket. I somehow did like 6 shots in a row that fell right in the center of the net. I was very surprised with myself to be honest.

Watching

Just yesterday I watched 100 Meters, an anime movie, from the same author of Orb: On the Movement of the Earth—my favorite anime series watched this year so far—and it quickly showed me more of that spark that I got from Orb’s writing. This movie portrays the life of a child prodigy who loves to run, and helps another kid how to do it, with a quote that would kickstart a rivalry for years to come: “Running the 100 meters faster than anyone else can solve almost anything.”

Is that just a naive child with a lot to learn, or is it worth considering as a core value? There are many points this movie brings up as the film questions, celebrates and critiques the sport, as we wonder how we find the joy in giving all our body has to offer for something as seemingly simple as a 10 seconds sprint.

The animation work here is incredible, switching styles a few times, from traditional animation, to some incredibly detailed rotoscoping, to an absolutely breath-taking continuous take, in ones of a race under heavy rain. This film is great, I implore you to watch it. There are a lot of life lessons to be learned and reflected upon with this movie. It’s raw and visceral, a work of art.

Gaming

I am happy to say that I have completed Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, which you probably already know since I mentioned it on my Monthly Summary a couple days ago. What a fantastic title that was, review coming soon though. Spoiler: go and play it.

I decided to team up with Wouter and play UFO 50 at last. It’s a collection of 50 titles and has a sort of meta/alternate history background: these games were developed by a game company from the 80s, for their own console and all. Because of this, we agreed to treat these games as “rented” from Blockbuster or something, which is how I would have experienced these games in real life, playing one for a week straight and then moving to the next, finished or not. I am currently playing Barbuta, and having an interesting time. It’s pretty complicated and archaic, but it does have some charm to it, and getting familiar with the map and mechanics has been kinda satisfying. I may write mini-reviews for these.

I am still playing Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream as well, and checking up with my Miis every day, there have been some fun shenanigans and things going on here, my Mii got married with Lucca, there are a couple of love triangles going on, and other drama that I find very funny and hilarious. My island is level 34 now. I should spend some time creating an island with an actual design though, I’ve been kinda lazy about it.

Reading

• Smoking Behind the Supermarket with You - Up to chapter 60. I am fully caught up with this romance manga, it is a monthly release so now I have to find something else to read from start to finish I guess. I will patiently wait for how this story progresses. It’s really good stuff.
• Heavenly Delusion - Up to chapter 43. I returned to this sci-fi mystery manga at last, I didn’t really read any new chapters, as I backtracked a few chapters to get familiar with where the story was going. It’s a very unique story with a confusing thread of events that have been slowly threading together. I really, really enjoy it so far.
• Spy x Family - Up to chapter 133. A super fun arc just ended! and Anya got some really fun slice of life moments on this one. Enjoyable comedy as always.
• Sakamoto Days - Up to chapter 229. Gotta admit I kinda lost the thread and need to read some more to get hooked again.

Around the Web

Blogposts

• My Budget Emulation PC, I’ve been wanting to do this too, but already got enough gaming devices.
• A Short Review Of Physical Nintendo Switch Publishers. This is just a fun time, I am inclined to agree with the ratings given here.
• Why are the Artemis II photos on Flickr?. A genuinely interesting look at how Flickr has evolved over the years. I am actually interested on revisiting that website. I actually made an account there when I was like 13 I think and shared some origami pictures on it.
• Putting my XTEink inside my Lochby Mini Field Journal makes it easy to take notes in my commonplace book. No more text is needed.
• How I was cured of my Garfield attachment. One of those totally random things I read and can’t stop. It’s a fun anecdote though.

YouYube

• Deconstructing the Deadly Lighting of Resident Evil - The production value of this video is off the charts, and the channel is surprisingly small. If you care about how videogames work I recommend keeping an eye on it.
• Why Every Generation Uses This One Slang Word | Otherwords - A very cool video. Watch it.
• Why aren’t actors ugly anymore? - I keep noticing how perfect everyone looks on all the posters for Netflix produced movies (and most modern movies in general) and yeah, crazy stuff.
• How We Keep Making Offices Worse - This was kind of eye-opening. Very sad to see how things are. I am in one of those open office spaces and yeah, it’s meh.

This is day 61 of #100DaysToOffload