Checking in

Inspired by renkon, I'm going to try to get more regular (possibly weekly) updates in here. I don't think it'll be a huge thing and right now my life consists mostly of work, classes, and entertainment as I've got time, so that is likely what I'll be writing about.

Learning Japanese

One thing that has me very excited is I'm finally learning Japanese. It's something I've wanted to do for a long time (ever since we had Japanese exchange students visit my second grade class in fact!) so I'm very glad to finally be doing it.

I'd gotten several false starts over the last decade at self-learning, but for whatever reason, I never managed to stick with it for long. The structure and guidance of a class setting has been very helpful for me.

I enjoy a lot of media out of Japan so it's been very gratifying being able to pick up on increasingly more of what is being said and written in the various things I've had time to enjoy.

Blue Reflection: Second Light

Or as I keep thinking of it, the magical girl(friends) game. I played the first in this series (duology? who knows) last year and really enjoyed it. Magical girls are oddly underrepresented in video games outside of licensed tie-ins, so it's nice to have a game that plays with a lot of the genre's tropes but is original in concept.

There's a tie-in anime that I understand is a prequel to the game, but from what I've heard is easily skipped. It's been an enjoyable time, exploring the world of fractured memories and seeing the girls' friendships develop and mature as they regain their memories and learn to be more supportive of each other.

The banger soundtrack doesn't hurt either.

Street Fighter 6

I haven't been playing this nearly as much as I'd like but the times I've been able to play with friends have been fantastic. The presentation of the game is a lot of fun and it's so hard to top the enjoyment of exchanging sets with friends in friendly competition.

A short one this week as I'd written up something longer but the tool I was using crashed so I'm just writing this up in Typora to then export and hopefully avoid that happening in the future. I don't know if this'll be a Friday or Saturday thing but at the very least I'm going to aim for one a week. Catch you next time!