I’m usually a pretty optimistic guy, but I think there are some occasions when you just have to go to bed and declare a do-over on the day.

I tried watching FLCL tonight.  This is my third time trying to watch it, and I really WANT to watch it because it’s part of the canon, it’s something that you Should See and I’ve had lots of people speak very highly of it, even people who aren’t normally anime fans.  It’s also from Gainax and you’re kind of supposed to worship Gainax if you’re a fan of a certain age.

The first time I tried to watch it, however, I’d been up for well north of 24 hours and I’d packed a transatlantic flight into the middle of my day and I was trying to watch it so I could actually stay awake.

I fell asleep about five minutes in, as you might expect.

I tried again a couple of days later, made it to the first eyecatch, and put it down intending to get back to it.

That didn’t happen.

Tonight, though, I had several hours free and I was going to watch the whole thing.  Only six episodes, after all, less than three hours to finally know what all the hype was about.  I made it through Harmageddon, for crying out loud, and if I can watch that beginning to end I can probably watch anything.

So I thought.

2 episodes in, I was forced to conclude that, well, this simply wasn’t going to be for me.  I think I’m getting old, I just need a little more linearity in my storylines.  🙂

Well, I said to myself, that didn’t turn out well but I still have about 2.5 hours before I should really head to bed, let’s look through this folder of movies that I haven’t watched yet.

I will confess here that I’m a bad person. I tend to get the netflix envelope in the mail, rip it so I can watch it later, and send the disc back.  If I was good at remembering to send discs back, this would probably be kind of abusive, but I’m terrible at remembering to send discs back so I’ll often rip something and find the disc still sitting in my backpack a week later.

Anyway, I decided that I would finally watch District 9 as I’d heard many good things about it and it was from that guy, you know, the one with all the hobbit movies.

It’s kind of an icky movie, but I was getting into it when I found myself coming to a rather unsettling conclusion.

See, early on in the movie there’s some human-alien interactions where the humans are talking english and the aliens are kind of gurgling at the humans and I’m kind of getting the sense of the conversation from the human side of things and I’d assumed that we weren’t supposed to understand the aliens so much as we were supposed to get the conversations from context.

It’s a fair ways into the movie before you start seeing fairly involved conversations with the aliens, and that’s about the point where I realized that something might have been awry.

A quick google search revealed that, well, the movie was SUPPOSED to have subtitles but that I hadn’t actually encoded them in.

So, that was pretty much that for my media consumption attempts.  I went to wikipedia and read the synopsis for the rest of the movie and it sounded pretty neat, so maybe I’ll give it another try sometime when I feel like I can make it through the icky bits.

I’ve also been looking for a new F2P kind of game, something that I can pick up and play for an hour or two at a time.  EQ2 is a great game, and I’m subscribed for the next year, but I’m at the point where getting something accomplished needs 11 to 23 other players and involves a fair time commitment.

I went back to Lucent Heart a week or so ago and found that it was just as incredibly cute as when I’d left it. I was level 30 and 90% into level so I killed a bunch of bees and anthropomorphic corn monsters and got to level 31.

Then I looked at my quest tracker, realized that I had no idea where any of these quests were trying to send me to, and further remembered that I’d quit playing in the first place because the process of getting new armor and weapons after level 25 involved doing crafting and/or group dungeons… and then I decided to call it quits and camp out for good.

It IS a really sweet game, though, I just don’t have the patience it takes to get very far in.

After that, I gave Rusty Hearts a try and had a good bit of fun with that.  It’s not really a MMORPG so much as a sort of persistant-world brawler or diablo thing, you choose a Character (of four) and then you can give that character a name and level them up and get new gear and so forth.

This lead to an odd conversation with my wife, where she asked me what class my on-screen avatar was and I told her “I’m an Angela” which lead to “no, that’s not my name, my name is X, I’m an Angela, and that person over there is also an Angela” and so on and so forth.

It falls down a little on the character customization is what I’m saying I guess.

Anyway, I strongly recommend it if you are the type of person who likes hitting your controller’s “A” button a lot and making things fall down.

So that was good but wasn’t QUITE what I was looking for.  It’s from a company called Perfect World, who does a bunch of different F2P games, and I figured that I’d already made an account with them to play Rusty Hearts, so trying out another of their games probably wouldn’t be too much of a hassle…

So now I’m downloading the inventively-named Perfect World International.  I’ll let you know how that goes – from the art I’ve seen, it’s super pretty and that’s a good start to things.

But for now, time for bed.