samcybercat | Entries tagged with animorphs

It's not Friday here yet, but since this week's

thefridayfive list is already up and I have time, I might as well go ahead and fill it in:

1. Do you enjoy reading?
Yes! I love reading! I spent most of my childhood and teenage years reading, but then in my twenties fell into the trap of casting it to the wayside in favour of other hobbies, though I always kept up reading comics at the very minimum for all that time. Then after moving house about three years back I decided to reclaim reading for myself and have been enjoying it again ever since.

2. What is the first book you remember reading?
I wish I could remember that in any satisfying answer. My mam told me that in nursery, the only complaint she had about me was that I'd get angry at the other kids when they damaged books, but I don't remember specifically the ones that I read. Although I sadly can't remember the title, the first book that I still have some memories of was a one filled with Christmas-themed short-stories about woodland animals.

3. Who is your favourite author?
Terry Pratchett, now and forever. I actually discovered his work via a point-and-click video game when I was somewhere in the range of 8-10 years old and once I realised that there were also books about Discworld, there was no going back. I started reading his work at an age that might be considered "too young" but he taught me so much compassion and humour through his work that I'd never change this.

4. What is your favourite book?
To this day, I cannot pick a favourite Discworld book. At some point I'd like to reread the whole series (if my current reading list ever thins out!) and then I might actually be able to answer this question.

5. What is the last book you read and the first you'll read next?
It's funny how my previous entry on this blog also answered this question, but the last book I read was Mythos by Stephen Fry. I am now currently reading the 40th Animorphs book and after that I'll be reading the 4th Megamorphs book, as well as selecting a new book to casually read while my niece is around, which will probably be another book that a relative gifted me for Christmas, so I don't seem unappreciative.

Current Mood: okay

I'm not sure if this is a general Dreamwidth ask game or one that

yarnofariadne came up with, but it's Wednesday and I realised that I could actually answer all of the questions right now, so decided to steal it:

What have you recently finished reading?

Mythos by Stephen Fry

A relative got me this for Christmas and I was just touched that someone in my family would care enough about me to remember that I like Greek myths. I also like to have a book that I casually read when my toddler niece is around, just so she can see people reading for fun instead of sitting on their phones - whether or not this is a fruitless effort, it is getting me to chip away at my book pile, so there is some benefit to me. This has been a good one to read a little bit at a time over the last few weeks, since it's entirely Stephen Fry describing the various Greek myths focused on the gods themselves. It was easy reading and I enjoyed it enough that I directly said to my relative that he can get me any of the other books in this series for next Christmas if he wants some present ideas.

What are you currently reading?

Animorphs book 40: The Other by K.A. Applegate

I'm just less than halfway through the next Animorphs book on my list. I don't want to talk too much about it before finishing, but it seems that the floodgates have been opened in regards to Andalites appearing on Earth now and I'm certainly not opposed to a centaur-like alien being described as being tall, buff and powerful with the horse part comparable to a Clydesdale.

What will you be reading next?

Megamorphs 4: Back to Before by K.A. Applegate

At this point in my recommended reading order for Animorphs, the series breaks off for another side-story. I have avoided looking up anything about this one, so couldn't remotely guess at what it might be about.

Current Mood: full

I'm back from my weekend away staying with friends at Leeds. As usual, it was a wonderful, chill weekend and it was good to catch up with them to talk about all the many things, since there are a lot of talks that feel better to have in-person than online. We spent a good chunk of the weekend playing the new Tomodachi Life, which I'm pleased to say is a vast improvement over the original game and was actually fun to watch! Though I have to confess that it's probably not a game I'd get myself, purely because I don't have the patience to make the miis look as good as I'd like. It was a lot more fun to watch my two artist friends make brilliant miis based on our pets and favourite characters.

While I was there, I also watched season two of Smoggie Queens with them, which continues to be one of the most entertaining shows I've ever seen. Mostly, I'm amazed that the BBC in this current climate would greenlight a second season for a loud and proud queer comedy about working-class people from Teeside, but I'll keep my fingers crossed that the series will continue to see the luck its gotten so far and gets another season, because there are plot-points that I'm very invested in now, particularly Sal's situation with her crush Mel.

( More Animorphs )

In terms of work, we've all had to do a bit of a shuffle for the next three weeks. We had a new-starter who had clearly bitten off more than she could chew with the job and quit effective immediately, so there were three weeks worth of rotas that the manager needed to cover. I didn't fair too badly in it, just working a bit more than I would've been originally. It's a shame, she seemed like a nice girl, but I could tell the job was a bit much for her. I think some people go for retail assuming it'll be an easy option and don't realise how much manual labour is involved in it in many places. I don't know yet if anyone else will be taken on to replace her though, so I guess we'll see.

Current Mood: okay

After just crawling out the other side of bank holiday during a heatwave, one of my co-workers informed me that this week is apparently also half-term, which I was unaware of now that my mam no longer works in a school and my niece isn't old enough to start school yet. So carry on I must. Spare a thought for people working in customer-facing jobs, well, all the time generally, but particularly during heatwaves when a massive chunk of the country's population are enjoying getting time off and being very vocal about that.

It's not all bad news though, as this weekend I'll be going to stay with my friends and former housemates in Leeds. While I had a pretty dreadful time in Leeds purely because of my work situation there (maybe more on that another time, though that'll definitely be a friend-locked entry...), this had nothing to do with my housemates, who remain two of my closest friends. I usually visit them for birthdays, but this time it's a "no particular reason" visit. They recently got a Switch 2, so I'm looking forward to getting to see the new Tomodachi Life and maybe Pokopia. The former I'm especially keen to see played by people who are into the same silly characters as I am, so we can put them into situations.

So basically, I've just got to make it to the weekend.

( I also finished reading Visser )

Current Mood: okay

I wanted to try to keep this journal somewhat positive, but bank holiday weekends are basically a nightmare for me and have been in every job that I've ever had, so my absence and exhaustion for the last few days stems from that. Of course I know that I'm lucky to have a job at all and I'm certainly a lot luckier than I was in my last job, which was a great many times more stressful than the one I have now, but even knowing all of this, I'm telling myself that it's okay to feel wiped out.

( Of Animorphs and reading guides )

As an unrelated side note, my icon here is of a character from a mobile game called "The Arcana" that I'm not actually very familiar with. I tried it briefly for a friend who liked it, but quickly realised that it wasn't for me. Regardless, the character in my icon, Portia, was the one love interest who I did really like in the game and her annoyed expression here is so fitting for many situations that I continue to use it, despite not caring for the game itself. I should at some point get a version of it where you can see her expression more closely though.

Current Mood: weird
Current Music: Gravity - Hazbin Hotel (unfortunately lol...)

Time for a little update on what I've been reading and writing:

( Talk about Animorphs and European Sonic comics fresh outta the 90s )

For other writing, I wrote two more kinkmeme fills last week. Both of them short, but that's still a little something about their ship that the requester didn't have before. In these cases, neither of them have reached their original requesters so far, but when you're filling older prompts, the dice-roll often does fall on the requester not finding it. Maybe someone someday will read it and enjoy it though.

Current Mood: okay

Yesterday evening, on my break at work, I finished Animorphs #31. Which brings the total of Animorphs books I've read this year up to ten so far, including the longer spin-off books that I've been reading at the places in the series where the reading guide I'm using recommends slotting them. This means that I've now met my minimum target for one of my New Years goals, which was to read 10-15 more Animorphs books this year. I'm feeling positive that I have over half of the year left to increase that number.

As the series is a long one, I'm probably not going to post my thoughts on each individual book as I finish them. I'll do it on an "as I feel like it" basis. This book in particular was focused on Jake, who is admittedly the least-interesting of the main cast to me. While I feel for his situation and sympathise with him, this so far doesn't translate into me finding him to be the most likeable. Though that might have something to do with my wariness of how he treats the other characters, particularly his recently-gotten-together-with girlfriend, Cassie, who he still doesn't show a lot of support towards when she's frequently faced with the entire group disagreeing with her worldviews (I wonder why this might be a bit of a sore spot for me, hmm?)

In terms of meeting other goals, I now both have only two main series comics left to post about on my Sonic blog (both of these entries are already written) and only 20 minutes left to watch of the post-game DLC for Resident Evil 8. Unless something unexpected happens, I'm fairly sure I'll get both of those done this week as well.

On a completely different note, myself and several other family members went to visit one of my mum's friends, whose birthday it was today. This resulted in me getting to meet three black sheep and a large, hairy pig up close as I watched them being fed. We also left off with an open invitation that I can just wander up to where they are and feed them whenever I like, which is a massive win in my books.

All in all, a very good day for my random day off this week. (Working shifts, days off happen whenever they happen and I roll with my lack of routine as best I can haha.)

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Music: Hollywood - Marina and the Diamonds

I wanted to properly start off by talking about some of my creative aims for this year, starting with New Year's Resolutions and moving on to other stuff that's cropped up as the months have gone on. We're now decently far away from the new year, but I've only made this account on the last day of April, so what can you do?

Generally, I'm very casual about New Year's Resolutions. If I'm ever not feeling it, then I don't make them that year. Some years I only make online ones and other years I only make offline ones. I always aim low to avoid disappointment and generally, by keeping them in the realms of what I know I can achieve, I've had a decent success rate with them.

This year, I started off with two goals:

1. Finishing live-blogging myself rereading Sonic the Comic

As a child of eight years old, this comic was my introduction to the Sonic the Hedgehog series. I was mesmerised by issue 80 and left wondering how the tough-seeming heroine, Amy Rose, could defeat a crazed version of her friend who was powered up by something called chaos energy. I had to know how that story was going to end and I owe it to that cliffhanger that I became a life-long fan of the series. I'd read the comic every second week from then until it ended several years later.

All of that was obviously a long time ago and other than a few stand-out stories that I'd go back to, I hadn't read the comic since I was a kid. Because of that, in November 2023, I did something I'd been wanting to do for a long time and started to live-blog myself rereading it from the start. You can check out my journey in doing this over here on this blog:

https://samobservessonic.tumblr.com/tagged/sam%20observes%20sonic/chrono

I didn't know starting out if this would be anything that anyone else would be interested in, but I was pleasantly surprised when the blog picked up a small following of interested people who'd ask me questions from time to time. What more can someone ask for?

At the start of this year, I was very close to finishing the series and I'm pleased to say that at the time of writing, I actually have now finished! Because I stagger posting updates on that blog, I'm not finished on there yet, but it's all been written out now and could be all posted as early as next week. I'll feel accomplished to tick such a long-lasting project off my list.

2. Read 10-15 more Animorphs books

As a kid, I enjoyed this series, but never finished reading it. Not for any particular reason, I just ended up not keeping up with it. But it always felt like a failure on my part. Then sometime last year, I remembered that I'm an adult who can do what I want. So I decided to read the series through from the beginning and finally be able to say that I finished it.

According to my media list on Bluesky, I've read nine books in the series this year, bringing me up to Book 30 in the series. So literally one book shy of my minimum goal. But I'd like to do better than this. My hope is that once my StC live-blogging has wrapped up, I'll be able to focus on this more. I don't plan to finish the whole series this year, but it'd be nice to get within a stone's throw of that, perhaps.

That's my two goals that I set for myself. But as the year's gone on, I've added something else to it that has spawned into another thing in itself:

Bonus: Watch longplays of video games I never finished as a kid

This is a bucket list one. I've loved video games my whole life, but for the most-part, I'm not very good at actually playing them. As a kid, there were so many times when I was left wondering how a game that was beyond my skills ended. But we're on the Internet now and there are whole communities of people who are good at playing video games who record videos of them doing so to 100% completion without commentary for the likes of me to watch. So once again, I've decided there's no point in leaving myself wondering how many of these games end when the answers are out there. I made a list in my head of games that I wanted to see all the way through and started on that. Which leads me to the next one...

Bonus: Watch longplays of all the mainline Resident Evil games

I picked Resident Evil 2 almost randomly off the list because I felt like watching it at the time. I had seen the first Resident Evil game from start to finish multiple times as a kid, but not any of the others. So, I watched through RE2 and enjoyed it - I swear I'm not trying to sound edgy by saying this, but there's something almost cosy about PS1 horror games, probably the nostalgia. After that, I also had Resident Evil: Code Veronica X on the list. Bwtween those games was Resident Evil 3, which I didn't have as a kid, but I was on a roll and thought that I might as well watch that one before moving onto Code Veronica X, since it had the same PS1 vibes I wanted at the time.

Anyway, after getting through both RE3 and Code Veronica X, I figured that I might as well be in this for the long haul and watch the other games as well. But only the mainline ones. This is a huge series and I'm sure the spin-off games have their merits, I'm not ruling out that I might watch those someday, but the later games are so long that it takes a lot of time for something I accidentally stumbled into doing and am so far just yelling my feelings about into space.

Right now, I'm halfway through watching RE8. Which means that I only have that and one more game to go with this and then it'll be back to my overall list of games to watch. Or probably back to Animorphs. I really should focus on that.

Which just about covers all of the various media I'm working through right now. I do also have the aforementioned Bluesky thread covering everything I end up reading/watching/playing/etc this year that I update when I remember:

https://bsky.app/profile/samcybercat.bsky.social/post/3m4ql3sir7s2k

It was partly that list that made me get myself into gear to make a Dreamwidth account. Because I generally do have more I want to say about stuff I check out than the character space that micro-blogging provides. As you can probably tell from how wordy this got. But! This was catching up with this year so far. Now that's done, hopefully my other posts will be a more regular length. Whatever that turns out to be.