Sakura Trick

 When I saw the first episode of Sakura Trick I couldn't continue watching. For reference, I had just come off of watching Bloom Into You, which is a thoughtful and relatively slow-paced, atmospheric anime. Sakura Trick is... decidedly not. It is high-strung emotions, rapid changes, dynamic and a bit chaotic. Small things are experienced by its cast as highly dramatic with lots of shouting and crying and over-blown reactions. Tones shift suddenly and dramatically and scene and style cuts come quickly. For example, when repositioning characters relative to each other becomes important, rather than animate them moving it will cut to a view of several symbols, each girl represented by their hair ornament, move those around quickly and then cut back to showing the characters.

I was completely not ready, or in the mood, for that at the time.

Bloom Into You

I don't watch a lot of anime. Granted, over the summer I watched all of InuYasha because I knew there was a new series coming out that sounded fun. But in general it rarely goes over one season of something a year. Yet, in 2021 I've now watched over half a dozen series, and got into reading manga as well which I never really did before, and we're still in the first month.

All of that thanks to Bloom Into You (Yagate Kimi ni Naru).

My Roleplaying History

This post was originally intended to be a post explaining my view on what "roleplaying" is, particularly roleplaying in a computer game. I thought I'd start it off with a quick introduction of my history with roleplaying, but that quick introduction soon turned into a massive post. Probably larger even than what I had originally intended the post to be. So instead I'll post this separately and keep the rest for another time.

When I was young my grandparents once game me a box set for a translation of the German roleplaying game "Das Schwarze Auge" (The Dark Eye in English). I didn't really understand it at the time, I was too young, and consequently it spent several years stuck in a cupboard. Untouched. Then, when I got older, I decided to check it out and it opened up a new world for me. The game introduced you to the concept of roleplaying very cleverly. More so than I've ever seen any other roleplaying game do since. Rather than start you with a bunch of rules and why those rules are important, the "book of rules" literally tells you to start with the "book of adventure" instead, which is the second book included in the basic boxed set. And this one starts with a story. A story that the book tells you to imagine someone is telling you.

New Blog

I suck at starting these. You'd think that after how many times I've tried starting a blog I'd be better, but no. Why so many attempts? Usually not much comes of it as I don't have or take the time to write for them, but the drive to write down my thoughts still exists. Not necessarily because I want people to read it, but more as a digital diary of sorts.

All that did teach me one thing though. To create a successful blog your content needs to be laser focused. Find a good niche and stick with it. As such, I have decided that this blog will be about whatever I feel talking about. Which, granted, might be argued to be a bit broad, but I'm sure it'll work out. Mostly though I expect to talk about entertainment: games, movies, tv, anime, books, etc.

I mostly play games on PC, preferring roleplaying games and strategy games. And I'm sure I've got a lot to say about roleplaying as my views are fairly... particular. But I've played pretty lots of different kinds of games. In general my tastes tend to be wide, watching probably way more than a person should and yet it always feels that there's so much more interesting stuff out there that I'd want to experience.

As for the title of the blog, let's just say that "lily" is "yuri" in Japanese. And a lounge sounds like a nice and relaxing place where people are welcome to unwind. A friendly place. That and I like the alliteration. That and it was the first one in a long list of attempts that wasn't taken yet.

We will see where this goes.