AC:NL Town Update: March

I posted a review of AC:NL back in the beginning of November, but I decided I wanted to do a little more in-depth post about my town itself! I haven't played it much over the winter, because I kind of burned myself out and I was busy with writing, but now it's spring in my town and everything is super pretty!

I finally unlocked the Dream Suite at the end of November, so I've had a lot of fun visiting people's towns! 

I finally just made a Dream Address for Anderson, so feel free to visit! I'd love to hear what you think (人 •͈ᴗ•͈✿ฺ) ♪

I've knocked out a lot of my encyclopedias! I think I'm more than halfway done with all three (bugs, fish, and deep sea). 

I've also had a lot of fun updating my villagers' greetings and catch phrases. I think Julian's current greeting is "b-baka", which is totally unoriginal. 

In which I am literally Prince. My town is also literally covered with flowers that I stole from the island mini games. I've been thinking about selling them all off and starting again since it's starting to get on my nerves;; I think I'll stop keeping all the island flowers after a certain point.

I restyled my hair to get rid of bedhead and accidentally gave myself a haircut;; It matches my current style, though, so I'm kind of happy with it. 

I got to play with my friend Lu from twitter to help them catch a centipede! They're the only person I've played with over wifi other than my cousin who gave me my 3DS, and I had a lot of fun with them! 

I'm hoping to play ACNL a lot more now that it's spring and there are lots of butterflies. They're my favorite thing to catch, even though they don't sell for much. It makes playing the game a lot more interesting, though, since in the winter I get bored of just fishing pretty easily. 

And that's all the interesting screenshots I have! Hopefully I'll make an update in the summer as to how my town has evolved. ACNL is a really calming (and time-eating) game, and I'm kind of suspecting that I'm going to play it a lot once school ends in May. 

Aperture Music

EDIT: Grooveshark is no more :( Most of the links I have in this post have broken, but please check the Google Doc link at the bottom! Hopefully soon I'll re-make all of my now-defunct Grooveshark playlists into YouTube ones.

Today I decided I'd share the playlists I've made for writing my NaNo, Aperture! I don't usually get to talk much about my NaNo, mostly because it's such an organized hot mess right now, but the music has stayed pretty consistent since I first organized the playlists.

A lot of the songs have been chosen because of their lyrics -- there's honestly a lot of Fall Out Boy music;; Some of them I picked because of their mood / feel alone. 

I don't know if this is going to embed correctly;; This is a playlist for the series in general.

I've also made playlists for each of the characters: Quinn, Nate, Fel,and Sol. If you look at the song titles and the lyrics closely enough, you can probably figure out their "secrets", or what they end up having to tell the other three about by the end of the first book. 

I guess this isn't a very impressive post, but I figured I'd take a break from all the book reviews I've been posting lately. (That, and I haven't finished one in time to write a review to post;; ) 

I think in the near future I'll make a post of some of the music I really enjoy outside of Aperture-related stuff, once I can organize it into some coherent playlist. I don't really like 8tracks, and YouTube can be a little inconvenient because videos aren't always just the music, but I've also run into problems with Grooveshark removing certain songs due to copyright. I had to update half the playlists to add back in songs that had been removed since the last time I checked. 

I uploaded a list of the songs in each playlist to a Google Doc in case Grooveshark removes any of them before I update the playlists again. (There's a sixth playlist listed at the bottom, but because those characters don't come into play at first, I didn't think I needed to list them. It's here if you're really interested.)

Hopefully I'll be able to post more about Aperture soon!

Orenchi no Furo Jijou

TL;DR anime for a yonkoma about a high school boy who saves a merman

(watched 3/4/15)

I've had this on my to-watch list for a couple months, but I decided to watch it because I felt like I needed something really light-hearted to watch and I had caught up with Binan. And it was perfect! 

The plot is very simple -- it's basically a kind of slice-of-life, I guess, and it's like Hetalia in the fact that each episode was exactly four minutes long. The characters were all super cute and unique! The relationships between the characters were really cute, and I'm amazed at how much they were developed over the course of the anime. Also, Tatsumi's voice actor also did Haru from Free!, which felt perfect to me. 

I really wish the anime was longer! I'll definitely try to track down the yonkoma manga. 

Earth & Sky by Megan Crewe

TL;DR aliens and time travel and trying to fix thousands of years of messing with time

(finished 3/4/15)

This is actually the first book I've received specifically for a review! I won it through a goodreads giveaway. A lot of book bloggers have disclaimers about the copies / ARCs they get, and I don't really have one figured out yet. I don't know if winning the book has an influence on my review, simply because it's my first time, but if anything it's a "oh cool look I won something for once" feeling. 

The concept of Earth & Sky is really cool. I was a little afraid it would be too depressing for me, but that wasn't the case at all. I mean, it's depressing in some parts, but that comes with the territory. It's got an interesting backstory to the plot that I don't think I've read about before, so that was cool. It made more sense to me than the explanations in the Lux series regarding the aliens. I mean, I get aliens take a little suspension of disbelief, but there's a difference between that and just assuming that all aliens can and / or want to appear human all the time. 

There was lots of doing stuff, though I'm not sure all of it necessarily counts as "action". The plot was coherent and Skylar didn't feel like a useless protagonist. She's probably a little plain / boring depending on how you look at her, but she's not frustrating a narrator. I agree with some of the reviews on goodreads that she was fairly reckless, but I honestly can't say I would do any better than her. I think her mistakes are reasonable for a girl my age, especially with what she's dealt with.

And there was also little to no romantic plot, something I'm really grateful for. I mean, there could've been something relatively small that I forgot between reading it and writing this review, but Skylar is in no way head-over-heels for Win like what happens in just about every other YA. There was a brief second that I was afraid the book would end with a kissing scene, and it didn't, and I was so happy! I'm kind of wondering if something is going to develop between them in the next book -- and I wouldn't doubt it -- but it's just really refreshing to be able to read a book without the romantic subtext fueling or taking over the plot.

I read this book over the course of a month, though, so I'm sure I've forgotten a lot of details. I'm hoping to re-read it at some point in the relative future (when I have the time / patience to marathon it) to write a better review.

TL;DR It's not all that dark (though I wouldn't consider it a fluffy read), and from what I remember, it has a great lack of romance.

Onyx by Jennifer L. Armentrout

TL;DR a better (but still kind of questionable) story than Obsidian

(finished 2/27/15)

I have to say, I did like Onyx a lot more than Obsidian. In comparison. I'm still not necessarily sure it's a "good" book, but I didn't hate it nearly as much as Obsidian. I think that's going to be my new Twilight for a while. 

Anyway, I think the romance was a lot better this time around. It's still a little iffy on a moral ground based on where their romance started from, but it seemed healthier. They communicated a little better (in comparison) and started to work together of their own free will and not because they were both compelled to. It also seemed less lust-y. I appreciated that. There were still times they got physical, but it wasn't angry making out or making things blow up, so it didn't seem as bad to me. I could tolerate it. 

There also seemed to be more of a plot. I honestly found it intriguing, both how there was more going on and how Blake was used for the plot. I like Blake better than I do Daemon, but I think that's beside the point;; My friend was still surprised that I thought Blake > Daemon by the end of the book, but he just seemed more human to me. (Ha.) 

Katy's book blogging also played more of a role, or was at least mentioned more. I really appreciate that she's a book blogger. I may not be as hard-core as she is, but hey, representation! She talked about her books a little more in-depth than she had in Obsidian. I don't know if they were vaguely based on anything or if they were just things Jennifer Armentrout made up. 

I'm still not sure if I'd want to continue reading the series, but I think Onyx has given me enough hope for the next book if I ever needed something relatively mindless. (I swear that's not supposed to be an insult. And I also feel like Opal might be on the depressing side, so I don't even know where I was going with that point.) 

In related news, I've accidentally started a reading trend of "alien boy / human girl" books;; I started out with Earth and Sky, which up to this point I still haven't finished, then I read the two Lux books, and today I just got my copy of Alienated back from my grandmother. She seemed to like that one a lot, so I'm looking forward to reading it. I'm kind of wondering if there are any other books from the library that I can pick up to continue this trend before I get tired of it.