July Update

It's been a while! Things have been really busy since my last post. Exams coming nearer, Mission 6 of PMD-E and wait... no things haven't as busy as that but I got hooked into other things as well, which have slowed down recently. The first was Avatar: The Last Airbender. I've been following the adventures of Aang and his friends through the magical world of benders overcoming the trials they faced and growing in maturity, wisdom and strength. I must say I loved the series and have been watching the sequel of the series: The Legend of Korra.

I love it as much! Here we meet Korra, the new avatar, born in the water tribe. She already has an affinity to her multi-bending abilities; water, fire and earth, with the exception of air bending, the one completely against her personality. Korra's got guts and is depicted to be strong early on with the elements she has mastered; which is already a big difference from the previous series.

Unfortunately for her, a great foe is awaiting her when she moves in with Tenzin, one Aang's son who is an airbender, to learn the art of air bending. She makes friends on her way, but also discovers the greatest enemy of benders, who might be linked somehow to Aang's death. If you break down the episodes, you might even learn a lot of things and discover the effort the creators of this show put in it. I really recommend watching this and get engulfed with this magical world where friendship, humour, action and thrill meet.

The next is, surprisingly for me, the first Japanese show I watch from the start to finish: Inazuma 11. While I'm not a fan of football, I really like how this show was made. The story in a nutshell features a boy, Endou, who simply loves football since he discovered a copybook of his deceased grandpa containing a lot of flabbergasting techniques and strives to become the next best football player. He decides to join the football club as soon as he enters junior school, the one attended by his grandpa when he was young.

Unfortunately, the school's football club is no more and, with the help of his friend Aki, he decides to re-create the club. At the start, only a few students are interesting in the sport and the notorious junior school of Teikoku Academy challenges them. The latter are known for destroying the school of teams who lost matches against them.

Endou manages to get enough players in the team in time and start training. On the day of the match though, they are all brought down to the ground by the other team. This is where Gouenji, a transfer student joins their team and scores their first goal. The Teikoku team forfeits for apparent unknown reasons and their school is saved. Join them in their adventures to get better at football and take the Football Frontier Cup and even grander adventures!

There's already a sequel to it, occurring some 10 years later I think, where football is no more the same. Its spirit has been drained and Endou once again joins the crew, but this time, as a coach.

Show and anime aside, work has been less demanding lately as we move away from the busy season. Some new people have joined the team and for a week, me and other colleagues had to do the reviewing of files before delivery. That was quite an experience but I should say that I didn't find it that much difficult. Things have been cool and fun really.

On the other hand, exams... I still can't understand how they dared put 'Centre' and 'East' in the same basket. What I mean is, they have 'North', 'South and East' and 'West' as choices for examination centres. 'North' was not a good choice for me, neither was 'West', nor 'East'. What I really wanted was 'Centre' but they somehow cannot give that.

And for 2 exam days out of 3, I had to go far away, requiring almost 2 hours of travel just to get to that examination centre D:<. Worse, it seems that the examinators pushed the level of the F5 paper 10 levels higher than it has been for the past few years. I can't really say how I did in that paper, but oh well, we'll know when we hit August.

Speaking about the future, I'm almost done with M6, couple thousand of words left and I'll be completely be done, save for the revision. I've also been participating in a Flash-Fic 'contest', if I may call it like that, which lasts for a month as from the first of July. I say, so far, I've been able to try out different writing styles, first person perspective, second person perspective and several genres: comedy, urban, sci-fi, romance (gulp) and horror so far.

It's a nice challenge and I don't have to write a lot of words! In some way, it's really easier, but in another way, it's quite hard when you want to include all the things you think are as awesome to put in, and you've got to make your characters known to your readers as fast as possible! It's my 5th day today and I've yet to come up with a new story ^^; Hopefully, it'll be ready by midnight.

I've also discovered something to help my writing. That 'thing' is called Brandon Sanderson! Seriously, this guy breathes awesomeness and just look over his blog and the youtube videos of his creative writing classes. He's just awesome! He is able to tell a lot of things that as writers, one might not be aware of but which still has an impact on the readers, unbeknownst to them even! Wouldn't you like it to know how to hook your readers and make them go 'oh, it's already over?' after making them read some 80,000 words?

Okay, I think this is long enough for now and I'll try to get another post a bit sooner than that. Plus I need to start working on today's Flash fiction. ^^;