Camp WriMo fail and my future plans for Twitch

I got stuck on chapter 2 of Children of the Crystals and it will not be done as scheduled. A number of things happened in my life, most recently me being sick, mostly because I tried to play Dissidia for an hour each day while working a full time job, tryign to maintain my version of the One Punch Man workout and trying to use every free hour to cram a novel in  a month and deciding that sleep would be the thing I would cut back on to make time for all of this. So my body decided to derail all my plans for the last week as I tried to recuperate, take off my first day of work since I started this job, and stop all my side projects and just lie on the couch playing Final Fantasy mobile games. On the upside, I did manage to finally beat Sol in Brave Exvius who had been holding me up for months and I finally got Crimson Archer, my first Sarah job in Mobius and te one I wanted most, not that any of you should care about this at all. I will try to finish this book, but I won't be trying so hard after August 1st.

And now for something completely different. I have been trying to get a following on Twitch using Dissidia, but I miss my other games, so I'm going to try changing gears and see if anyone finds it more interesting. Starting in the first weekend in August, every Saturday from 9-10:30 PM EST leading up to Toonami, I'll be doing a special show for Twitch and my first game for this block will be Dragon Quest Builders which I will be finishing with audio commentary, which I haven't done before, and I will be reading the dialogue which does not come with voiceovers and you'll all get to hear my VA acting chops which will be amusing and entertaining either because I'm so good, or because I'm so bad. During the week, I'm going to try getting back into Final Fantasy XV Comrades and whenever I have managed to finish one or the other I'll be rotating in Uncharted 4 because I have it and wny not? Eventually, I will return to Dissidia, because there are some things in that game that I really want to do, but they will take time and I need to clear out the other games that I believe will have more definite endings in sight. For those who can't figure out my meaning, the other three games I have listed here actually do have endings to the story and once I reach those endings, I intend to stop playing them, whereas Dissidia is much more open ended, even when I finish story mode and get all of Kefka's titles, appearances, etc. the multiplayer option has no end in sight so I'll get back to regularly scheduled Dissidia content eventually.

I would also like to note that I'm going to put everything on the backburner this November as I take on NaNoWriMo for the last time. I'm not giving up writing, I just realize I only have one more NaNoWriMo left in me, not that I don't have the stamina or the ideas, just only one that seems to match both requisites. My finale will be Supers, a story I have talked about before, in which superheroes exist in the real world, as in they actually integrate into normal society. One mutation with three phenotypes live in normal society, but the adjustment is...awkward.

Broly

Yeah, you read the title,thats really all yo need to know. I don't know why you're still reading, you read the only word that needs to be read right now, Broly. The single most overhyped character in the singe most overhyped series in the history of anime is back, twice. First, they have remastered the original Broly movie, The Legendary Super Saiyan to show in theaters September 15, then in January there will be an english dub of the new Broly movie where Akira Toriyama makes him canon.

For those who don't know, Broly is the Legendary Super Saiyan, who, if he fit in with the timeline at all, was right before the Cell Games when the cast of Dragon Ball Z encountered him. Broly was born the same day as Goku and was irritated by the screams of baby Kakarott in the crib next door. But Broly was way more powerful, so powerful Vegeta's father saw him as a threat even as a baby and tried to murder him, throwing him and his father Paragus in a trash heap. But when Frieza blew up the planet, Broly used his insane power level to generate a protective shield that allowed him and his father to survive. As Broly grew up, Paragus equipped him with a control device and used to wreak havoc across the universe. Then Paragus found out prince Vegeta had settled on Earth and tried to bring him to a distant planet that was soon to be destroyed by a planetary collision and hoped that he could get rid of all of his competition for strongest Saiyan in the universe in one shot. Goku uses instantaneous transmission to follow Vegeta, Trunks, Gohan, Krillin, Piccolo, and Master Roshi so they can all meet the Legendary Super Saiyan, not knowing it's Broly. Everything is going according to plan until Broly recognizes Goku and starts screaming "Kakarott!" and has the single most epic tantrum ever. I mean, even when Majin Buu shows up in the series, both of his incarnations combined plus Lord Beerus don't measure up to the madness of Broly. What follows was one of the greatest fights ever if only because it involved Goku, Vegeta, Gohan, and Trunks all going super saiyan and fighting another super saiyan all at the same time, and Broly is able to fight all four super saiyans plus Piccolo and Krillin at a time when they actually still mattered.

Broly was so epic, he got two sequels, and now, Akira Toriyama has made another movie, this time canon. For those who don't know, Toei animation who makes the anime took a few creative liberties over the source material manga and Toriyama largely ignores it and runs the story as if Toei's filler doesn't happen, particularly the movies that, while being spectacular eye candy, never fit the story. In fact, rumor has it, Vegito happened because Gogeta was used in a Toei movie before Toriyama could write him in and did not want to seem like he was copying the people who were copying him. So it is a bit surprising that he took another crack at Broly and supposedly he claims he acually made the character originally and forgot about him and after years of fandom, wanted to give him a place in Dragon Ball Super. Based on how things have gone so far with this reboot, it occurs to me that the Broly movie is going to be a back hand to the fans that we will love nonetheless. Why? Two reasons #1 it is Dragon Ball #2 it is Broly, and if I can gauge anything about the fandom, if it is even remotely coherent, that will be all that matters. Also, I will be watching it, because I am one of those fans.

My first Final Fantasy Dissidia ESL Tournament

I have had a busy week and did not accomplish a lot in writing, I'm still stuck in the first chapter of my book, still writing, just having a hard time keeping up the pace. My main characters Kelsus and Ariana have just met and they are preparing for their journey, largely exposition. Part of what's holding me up is playing Dissidia NT on Twitch, BTW please go check out my Twitch page and follow me.

After two months, I finally got to play in a Final Fantasy Dissidia NT ESL Tournament. I sucked hard. I was so focused on getting in that I wasn't so great in the match itself. I got thrown off a little by my team, who to their credit are way better at this than I am, so it is not their fault that I suck and I am in no way blaming them for my lack of skill. The thing is, we had a hard time organizing and they tried to give me some last minute pointers which would have been helpful if I wasn't trying to integrate their suggestions into my play style. I was most put off by them telling me to use different EX skills and HP attack which ran counter to my usual play style. Now since I suck, I don't have a lot of room to say that they are wrong, but they had kind of stripped me down to square one and still brought me into a pro tournament against experiencd players when everything I knew had gone out the window. One thing I learned is, next time I need to stand my ground on certain things and know what it is I bring to the table. I do need to learn from others and learn to cooperate, but if I don't stand for something I'm not really in the game. Because I got thrown off, I had a hard time doing anything more than running, throwing spells and hitting the crystal core and summoning. I have found I am particularly good at that last skill set, but I need to work on the rest of my strategy to take advantage of my team mates while still being more useful than just random attacks that miss more than hit because I'm too distracted by learning new strategy to implement it effectively in a match. I am taking a few hints to heart, stay behind my team mates to use them as a shield when I'm paying Marksman, jump to use firaga and charge it because it's probably Kefka's best bravery attack, switch up opponents so they don't see what's coming, and look for opportunities for combos with my team mates, hitting an opponent with an HP attack after a good combo to leave them vulnerable.

Also, I've been reading The Kindly Ones, volume 9 of Sandman, the penultimate volume in which the Endless ends, Dream dies. I haven't quite finished reading it, and I'll go more in depth next time, but Gaiman really wanted to bring back everything for this one, using at least one character from every volume so far to show how they were all relevant to the grand finale. The main thing here is that the namesake characters, the Furies, the three fates, Maiden, Mother, and Crone are bent on killing Dream because he killed his son Orpheus. Now, there was a full volume between the death of Orpheus and the beginning of the Furies hunt, and I didn't read it,but I am now very curious to find out why they didn't act sooner. Clearly, Gaiman always intended the Furies to be important, they have been the most constant recurring theme throughout the series, coming in many forms, they are without doubt the most constant feature of this story and now they come to kill Dream. One thing that doesn't quite make sense is that Dream killed his son at his son's request, and yet the Furies come in vengance for a life that didn't care. The rules of the immortals are clearly unique and incomprehensible to all but Gaiman. The answer, I hope, will come next week...

I'm going to close with some thoughts on FLCL Progressive which ended it's run on Toonami last week and actually made more sense than the original. Atomsk finally appeared in his true form of an astral firebird. The rest of the episode didn't make a whole lot of sense, but it seems if there is one tue theme to FLCL, it's the awkardness of adolesence and puberty and coming of age, and the metaphor of what if it was even wierder by involving aliens, robots, portals in your brain, and a secret war between crazy people and an organization bent on making everyone sane. Each iteration of FLCL will ultimately carry no other running theme than Haru, a female japanese Peter Pan who wants to hang on to her youth in the most ridiculous and impossible way and the poor youths she drags into her quest.

Pop Team Epic and other weird crap from this past week

So first of all, last week was the premiere of Pop Team Epic on Toonami, proving to me, once and for all, that 7th Moon must be good enough if they will approve of this crap. Pop Team Epic is absolutely the worst thing I have ever watched, and I say this with confidence that it is the worst, because not only is it so bad that I feel that I need to invent a new adjective to properly describe it as no such word exists that contains enough venom to describe my loathing of this show, but then after you watch it, youare immediately subjected to watching it a second time only with new voice actors doing everything exactly the same as before. I can appreciate that this show has to have the lowest production costs of any show due to the fact that using the same animation means half the cost of any other show, but beyond that there is nothing positive to say about this show. Perhaps something is lost in translation and there are some jokes that make more sense to the original Japanese audienc, but to Americans, it's crap.

The show consists of a series of skits that fire off at a rapid pace similar to Robot Chicken, except that Robot Chicken hits a punchline and reveals there was a point to what you watched, while Pop Team Epic sems to be just random frames of animation with absolutely no coherence except that they al feature two girls named Popuku and Pipimi who dont really have any constant traits other than their appearance as two Japanese school girls one tall and blue-haired and one short and blond. The blond one seems to have a short temper and is prone to violent fits of rage, and that seems to be the only consistent trait throughout the sketches. Otherwise they are simply fillers chaining together scenes that are random not only in story content, but also animation styles. At the very beginning of the show, there is a teaser for a fake anime which appears to be vastly superior in every way and at the end, I felt like I would have rather actually watched the fake anime.

I kind of wonder about the voice actors that they got to do this show, which are different every time so they quite literally go through every voice actor that works in anime. Perhaps they found it fun since they are used to jumping around to different projects and perhaps if they don't know about the repetition joke, since each actor only voices one half of the show and never has to be there for the other half, they may find this refreshingly original. Personally I'm disappointed that respectable actors have conceded to doing such crap, but they may just be too isolated to know how bad it is. Mind you, I don't blame the actors, it's not their fault the show is crap, they just do what's written for them,we have to blame the Japanese crew for giving them crap to work with and whoever agreedto make this a project that talents who should recognize they are above this, are apparently contractually obligated to do this drivel. At least that's the excuse I want to give them so none of them feel blamed, for those actors that actually believed in this one with all their heart and enjoyed and embraced it, I fear for their mental health.

Okay, that's all for now, I am really short on time between writing Children of the Crystals (not much progress to report, still stuck in chapter 1) and playing Dissida as well as live tweeting with Toonami. I need to get back to work and just wanted to share my feelings on this show. See you later, or sooner on Twitch.