Media Diet – August 2023

This month started off with some more movies, I watched Minority Report, My Neighbor Totoro, Suzume, and Kiki’s Delivery Service. All of these were quite good in their own way and I continue to enjoy my journey through the world of Studio Ghibli movies.

I also watched a bunch of video essays this week starting off with The World Is Not Ending by Sophie From Mars and continuing with Conspiracy on the Left along with a few others like her Resimania series. I have become a big fan of her work and I have added her to the list of folks I support on Patreon.

Speaking of video essays I also watched Sovereign Citizens: Pseudolaw & Disorder by münecat, YouTube has been recommending this particular video to me for a while but I’ve only now gotten around to watching it. It’s good!

Other than that, a lot of my free time this past month has been taken up by playing Baldur’s Gate 3. What a game. Just might be the best video game RPG I’ve ever played. I am slowly nearing the end of my first campaign and I’m looking forward to writing something longer about the game when I’m done.

That’s all from me this month, see y’all next month!

Review: Cloudpunk

Just one night. That’s what Rania, the main character keeps saying to herself. Let’s just get through this one night. In the cyberpunk metropolis of Nivalis, one night can be the difference between life and death, between the wildest riches and the depths of destitution.

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Media Diet – July 2023

July has been a fairly productive month as far as media goes. I decided earlier in the month that I wanted to start watching all the Studio Ghibli movies in chronological order.

So this month I watched three movies, all of them Studio Ghibli movies. I started with Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind and then I watched Laputa: Castle in the Sky and ended the month with Grave of the Fireflies. All of these were excellent movies in their own right. Grave of the Fireflies especially is one of the saddest movies I’ve ever watched. I will be continuing my watching of Studio Ghibli movies over the next month.

I read two books, the first was Sister Outsider which is a series of essays and speeches by the Black lesbian feminist Audre Lorde. I enjoyed the book a great deal and every bit of writing imparted some wisdom and knowledge that will enhance my understanding of the world going forward.

I also read The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho, one of those rare books that I finished in one sitting. Partially because it is quite short but also because it is quite good. I am still processing the themes of the book but in short I think it also imparted some wisdom that will help me down the road.

I played and finished one video game, Cloudpunk, It is an adventure game set in a gorgeously realized cyberpunk setting, a city called Nivalis. I very much enjoyed my playthrough of the game. The game leaned into cyberpunk genre tropes at certain points with its characters and themes but it was never overdone. I am very much looking forward to the developer’s next game Nivalis.

That’s all from me this month, see y’all next month!

Some Quotes from Sister Outsider

This past week I have been reading Sister Outsider, a collection of Audre Lorde’s essays, papers and speeches. Every bit of writing in this collection is worth reading. Lorde’s writing remains applicable and useful to our current struggles and I found myself wishing that I had read her words earlier in my life. Better late than never I suppose.

While I was reading this book, I used my Kobo ebook reader’s annotation function to highlight and save a few choice quotes that I thought were particularly important.

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