The grind continues · 2:31pm February 23rd
No, it's actually later than usual. I had a day off today, and let me tell you, sleeping in is great. What's even better though, is not having to deal with my horrible class yesterday which brings the toll down to three weeks left before spring break and my move to Yamaguchi! On the one hand, I'm more than happy to leave this dreary city and move somewhere that is half as rainy annually. On the other hand, that also requires packing and moving all my things. Not surprisingly, I've acquired a whole lot of crap since I've moved to Japan. It's mostly gunpla, some of which is very rare or exclusive, but I also bought a desk and a chair and there are cooking utensils, a handful of clothes, a mattress, a ton of those little storage cubes that I really like.
The nice thing about moving in here is that this is a college town, so lots of people move in and out all the time. For 7K (yen, obviously) a month, I was able to rent the world's shittiest futon, a pillow, a washing machine, a fridge, and an electric burner. Save the futon, which gave me the worst two nights of sleep I ever had before getting my mattress in, I use all the other things all the time. Provided I get the apartment I was looking at, I should have all of these things in the next apartment, but they're complimentary with the company that owns the place, and the rent is even a bit lower than it is here. All that, on top of giving back the car which means I get an extra 20K monthly, means that I should be able to start saving some money going forward while still paying my bills (which mostly amounts to a credit card these days.)
Still, for as exciting as the move is going to be, I am a little anxious about the timing of everything. It will be tight trying to get it all in the car and down to my new place, and that makes me think that I'm going to be making the trip to and from Yamaguchi by car once or twice. I have a friend who will help me move, but there's only so much car space in a civic R. I think, between the two of us, we might be able to get everything, but I'm not betting on it. What I am betting on is having a few things that I'll have to put in a suitcase and take with me on the train or bus back to Yamaguchi after returning the car, and that's going to be a half day event one way or another.
My biggest problem with living in what we call 'inaka' is that getting anywhere from here is a massive pain in the ass, on top of being expensive and inconvenient. To take a bus from my local station to Yamaguchi, it's three hours to Hiroshima, a transfer, and then an hour and a half to my new city, along with costing me about 6K. that's a lot of food money just on traveling. For context, this is about 155 miles. Now, from my new place which is along the bullet train line, to travel 155 miles, I can pay 3K more and go that far in an hour and a half. The whole trip, done, in an hour and a half.
For that same 6K, I can go from my new place to this place, and blow money on my favorite hobby in an hour. On the one hand, I feel like there are a lot of government imposed restrictions to discourage driving. On the other hand, Japan is second largest producer of cars in the world. It's a very strange dynamic that I might try to skirt in the coming year thanks to some loopholes I might be able to exploit, provided I can save the money. God willing, I should, so we'll see how that goes.
In other news my addiction to anime and more recently, manga, continues to grow. There's a show that's been running since the beginning of fall called Shangri-la Frontier. It's about a sweaty gamer who is convinced that, instead of playing the super shitty games he normally plays, to play the 'best' full dive VRMMO that has ever been made. If this sounds familiar, then you may have read my blog post, or you've seen Sword Art Online. Because this is actually a web novel turned manga turned anime, the writing is very good (unlike that other series) and the stakes are relatively low, but never feel that way. In a recent episode, our heroes (term used lightly in regards to Pencilgon), defeated a crazy boss with some high flying action, and the most epic montage of anyone beating Gwyn, Lord of Cinder, ever. To say I was hyped as fuck would be an understatement, and over the course of the next two days, I read from that episode around chapter 50, to the latest chapter which was 166 at the time.
I find it so interesting because, Shangri-la Fronter, the game within the series, is so interesting that it could be the entire series on its own. However, the series doesn't limit itself to that and these characters are real people with lives outside of the game, and real gamers who play other games. We see 'not armored core pvp,' a shitty fighting game, a real fighting game, a pro fighting game exhibition match, and all of this between playing Shangri-la frontier and each part sucks you in just as much as the main plotline of the game Shangri-la Frontier. The exhibition match arc is something like 25 to 30 chapters on its own, and it's so engaging during the fight that I legitimately forgot that the title game was the main point of the series. It's so creative, so fun, and the characters are so good, that it's easy to get lost in here.
Of course, the other shoe has to drop sometime, and that would be when I ran out of chapters to read. It updates weekly, and the art is gorgeous, so of course, one chapter is like five minutes of an episode, or less if it's an action heavy chapter, and it's gone, just like that. Adding SLF to my reading list, I've now got it, JJK, and CSM to read weekly... when they have weekly updates. I'm also up to date with Made in Abyss, but that's not hard when a new chapter comes out once in a blue moon. That blue moon being like two weeks ago, and holy shit, the cliff hangar is killer.
Once upon a time, I got into the MLP fandom and made some friends. One of them had a rule about not reading incomplete stories, as the chance that they never finished was very high. I stuck to that, but still read a couple which I kind of regret because the one story did eventually finish and I would have to reread some or start over to actually get back into it, and I can't possibly be fucked to do so. And now I'm willfully throwing myself into unfinished manga, and it sucks a lot. Worse, I'm considering throwing myself into more manga with Dungeon Meshi and Gushing over magical girls being amazing as of the last few episodes. the latter is the most troubling because I read the manga up to chapter 50 or so before the anime aired, and now that we're at this part (NSFW) and the fantastic comedy writing is coming back into the fold, I want to go back and read up to the present with it too. Reading manga is pain. Don't do it.
Anyways, I might have some interesting stuff next week, so stay tuned for (possibly) original fiction short stories.
Until Next Time~
-KCZ
I read about the distance you need to travel to make the move and the cost of that travel and stared crunching some easy numbers. For that amount of money I can buy one-and-a-half tanks of gas for my car (at current rates), and a single tank can take me around 400 miles. This makes it seem like traveling is much more expensive over there in general, but then most Japanese citizens aren't paying car notes, so maybe it balances out?
Sometimes I think I'd like to read manga again. Then I hear stories like this and I'm like "nnnnope."
5769618
Yes and no. On the one hand, you can take a train just about anywhere for 20K and be there in like 4 hours, provided you're close to the bullet line. on the other hand, at some point, it becomes cheaper to fly, and from my part of the world, it's legitimately cheaper to go visit Seoul than it is to go to Hokkaido.
You can choose not to suffer by reading stuff that's actually done. One thing that was so nice about going through my gundam manga is that they were all finished and I got the whole story uninterrupted, it was great.