Monday, September 26, 2016

Round-UP: September so far edition

Wowza, this has been a few weeks of stress, procrastination, and yet another cold. I would say that hopefully this week is going to go better but not only do I still have a cold and there's one other problem, I've run out of anime.

In the past few weeks I've covered my last few spring shows, the possibly queer-baiting Tanaka-kun is Always Listless and the Ghibli-esque Flying Witch, and I talked about the first The Ancient Magus Bride OVA on The OASG, and there's always a race at the end of an anime for me to finish up a backlogged series to fill in the gap, but right now there are several long running shows I'm almost done with but not quite. So, hopefully I'll be able to finish one up in the next week but I'm not entirely sure (plus, I ended up falling behind on all of my summer shows, it's part of a bigger thing about my changing feelings on adaptations that I'm going to devote an entire post in 12 Days of Anime in December). 

I've actually kept up pretty well with my blogging over on The OASG actually. In addition to my traditional book review of the space-opera Aurora over here, I've covered the first volume of Yozakura Quartet (since I loved the more recent anime adaptation), the first two volumes of Horimiya (which might be my favorite on-going romance), and the first three volumes of the Log Horizon spin off The West Wind Brigade.

In addition, I am now officially one of the co-hosts on It's Not My Fault the OASGcast Isn't Popular! since Muse had to step down due to real life duties. I can feel people side-eyeing me right now going "Helen, but you barely have time to review, is this a good idea?" and I do think this is going to work. The recording time is in that weird timeslot where I'm nearly always home anyway, and since I don't edit the podcast it's only a one hour investment from me every two weeks, even a regular review takes me closer to two hours to do (honestly they used to be quicker for me to write but shifting jobs took away some of my mental "pre-writing" time so I have do to more at once). So, gonna try my best to find interesting topics to talk about and make it popular!

Oh finally, I did actually do a write-up on SPX 2016 that I went to a couple of weeks back, con was perfectly fine (aside from being crowded as all hell as usual), but ran into a migraine which meant I couldn't do anything else that day, which is a real problem when you're trying to catch up with blogging....

Monday, September 5, 2016

Book Review: Aurora

I haven't had much luck over the years with young adult science fiction in general so the obvious solution to this is to try more adult sci-fi titles. I still haven't read that many, I keep meaning to fix it but my to-read list is to long that it'll take a while for that to take effect, but with my new goal of staying more caught up with current titles I'm hoping that sci-fi won't be such a rare occurrence here!


Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson