Monthly Wrap Up: October

Hello, everyone! How has October been for you? It’s been a nice month for me. I’ve enjoyed myself quite a bit. With my previous novel’s first draft done and dealt with, I suddenly found myself with more time to spare, so I went ahead and prepared some blog posts for November. It’s a good thing too, as I don’t think I’ll have much time in November to actually write a lot of blog posts since I’ll get tied up with NaNoWriMo and my thesis.

That said, I’ll still be taking a week away from the blog at the start of November. From today until around November 7. I’ve a few blog post scheduled, so some of them are still coming, however, I’ll be less active in the comments and won’t be blog hopping. I’m hoping to build up a good enough buffer for the first week of November so that I won’t panic when the end of the month draws near.

I rewatched Bakuman this month. It’s one of my favorite animes to watch when I need to get my motivation levels up for something. (Which was slightly low when I was approaching the end of writing my previous novel.) It’s about two boys and their dream of creating a manga and then having it made into an anime. Plus it’s a cool look behind the scenes of creating a manga. After that I went back to another old favorite School Rumble which is a slapstick, highschool romantic comedy. Johnny English: Reborn is also another slapstick comedy I watched this month. Watching both got me thinking whether a slapstick style of comedy would translate well to a novel. Is Percy Jackson and Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy considered slapstick humor? Anyway, to round up the month, I watched Clerks a comedy by Kevin Smith, which I’ve been meaning to get to for awhile. It’s really good, better than what I had expected. It’s really funny with a lot of pop culture references and nerdy arguments, like whether or not the Rebels killed innocent contractors on board the second death star in Return of the Jedi.

I continued playing a lot of FIFA 16 this month, I finally played on world class difficulty and started a save as AFC Wimbledon. #DFTBA (AFC Wimbledon is the Nerdfighter sponsored team, in case you’re wondering.) Having a lot of fun climbing the ladder of English football. Survivalist is another survival game. I like the concept, but there’s a few quirks and it’s hard to get use to that camera. Cossacks 3 was an RTS game that I’ve been waiting for a while, and it kind of blows. It’s okay, but things take so long to build that it’s hard not to turtle down and focus on building the largest army you can before fighting your enemies. And if you lose, it takes another long time to build your army back up again, so unless you have some left to protect your base, you’re going to have a hard time doing that.

NBA 2k17‘s MyCareer Mode was fun at first, but got tedious very quickly, very fast. The new additions to MyGM and MyLeague is nice, hope to explore more of it soon. Sorceror King: Rivals was a 4X game I played to tide the wait for Civ 6. It was decent, had a unique twist where players would actually fight against a single superpower powerful opponent as well as each other. Civilization VI is amazing! It has a few flaws that needs to be patch. Exploits, glitches and the like, but it’s the best vanilla Civilization game by far. Looking forward to the patches and what they add in future DLCs and expansions.

I barely managed to make a dent into Gardens of the Moon this month, which is slightly worrying, considering I need to make a post every two weeks. I’ve not finished the next chapter yet, and there’s one chapter coming up that’s about 90 pages. I’m so behind. The Dagger in the Desk is a short story in the Lockwood & Co series. I didn’t want to get this at first, but I was wondering that those cases referenced in the start of the Whispering Skull were. Turns out, it doesn’t tell that story at all. The Whispering Skull itself was fun, as was the Hollow Boy. Reviews are coming :). I finally finished the Raven Cycle too, the Raven King was great. Looking forward to explore more of Maggie Stiefvater’s works.

That’s October for me. How was yours? What movies did you watch? What games did you play? What books did you read? Let me know in the comments down below.