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.
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