mDuo13.com - The Amorphously Collected Thoughts and Works of Rome Reginelli

Man, three CGs in a row. You must think I have a major project I'm procrastinating from or something. That's pretty much how it is. A 15-page senior seminar paper is staring me in the face so I'm retreating into a corner with my tablet to draw characters from slice-of-life youkai-befriending anime. But soon, soon I will have to do that project and then I will be DONE with it and basically done with college...

During my conversation with Chloe yesterday, she asked me if I wanted her to draw anything else, so I said, "sure" and asked her to draw Erin here. The result, while not impressive, comes less than 24 hours later. Not a bad pace by the both of us, if I do say so myself.

After about 95 hours of gameplay, my party finally beat the last boss of Tales of Vesperia. Overall, it was a really satisfying game with great characters and lots of good party interactions. I wanted to play as most of the party members, but each character is individualized enough that in order to get good enough with any one, you can't really spend time learning the others, especially later on when each character has a variety of different tricks and commands thanks to the huge array of skills available. Perhaps later on I'll replay the game on the PS3 with different friends, and get to try out something new... or perhaps I'll get to play Estelle again. She's good enough that I don't mind either way. I'm looking forward to hearing her voiced in Japanese and seeing the new story points of the PS3 version. But for now, in celebration of finishing the game, I made a new CG of her even though I've been absurdly busy lately.

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In the past couple days, I've finished several things that have been plaguing me for weeks: a story for my creative writing class (to be posted after the class critiques it and I do the quickest edits), an essay for my English seminar, and Simoun. The latter was unfortunately not as good as I had hoped. As I previously mentioned, it is blessed with a great OP and a solid ED, but everything else about the show is rather mediocre. I managed to finish it, in part for completion's sake, though the show wasn't without redeeming moments occasionally, after pulling an all-nighter during which I wrote a combined total of about 14 pages essay and story (bringing the two to totals of 5 and 17, respectively). And so, with that and pretty much everything of the past season out of the way, it's out with the old and in with the new.

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So here I am watching my friend's elemental shaman throw enemy priests off cliffs to thematically appropriate music after finishing a spectacularly placid episode of Akikan... yeah, it's been a slow day. That's okay, though. After my pleasantly uneventful spring break, I had a friend over to visit, so this past week has been a storm of three-Xbox, six-player Left 4 Dead ("Left 6 Dead"?) and other largely multiplayer pursuits... so it's nice to have some time to catch up on anime and a quieter form of leisure.

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In the course of the last three days, I've watched all of Maria-sama ga Miteru - Two original series (13 episodes each at 24 minutes), the OVA (5 episodes of 50 minutes) and all 11 episodes of season 4 that have aired thus far (24 minutes each). That's a lot of anime. And it's been a very enjoyable series for me, for several reasons. But as always when I finish with something as engrossing as this most recent marathon, the recoil when I finish is harsh. After such a break from thinking about ordinary matters, I end up reexamining everything with new perspective, often harshly. This time, the hard question I find myself asking is whether I'm actually making progress.

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