The Professional Gamer - October 31, 2014

Hello and Happy Halloween!  I hope everyone had a great night with an appropriate amount of treats(whatever you deem that to be) and not too many tricks.  I spent the week leading up to the holiday enjoying some relatively recent anime and video games.  I'm also preparing for my first business trip, which has been a bit stressful, mostly in terms of ensuring that all of my projects are wrapped up before I leave.  However, I still managed to spend some time in fun pursuits.

Reading: For the time being, I've given up on the sound recording books.  For one, I'm preparing myself for a half-marathon, and spending most of my lunch hour running (the time that I would otherwise use for reading).  For another, I'm just not sure how much more I need to understand to get a good quality podcast recorded.  Listening through the past few weeks of our recordings, I feel that I have a pretty good grasp on the sound quality and that much better returns could be had in further refining our content.  

However, I did find something else to read.  You may recall that a few months ago I purchased a Humble Bundle that included the first four issues of the Lumberjanes.  I mentioned this before, but the book is very good.  I highly recommend it to fans of supernatural adventure comics.  The characters area great and feel well grounded in the story world, and the artwork depicts both action sequences and mellow conversations equally well.  Go check it out!

Watching: After this week, I have watched about 8 episodes of Silver Spoon.  The show has been very interesting so far.  I was really taken aback by the treatment of the small farm vs. the mega-factory farm in one of the recent episodes that I watched.  I had honestly expected the series to treat the factory farm harshly, given the overall tone about how the farmers respect and care for their animals.  But this may have been me projecting some of my own concerns onto the series.  The series continues to amuse me with its quirky characters and passion for good food.

I also decided to catch myself up on the latest episodes of Legend of Korra. The way that the writers have treated some of the secondary characters, giving them much more characterization in their relatively short scenes, has been a great addition to the story this season.  I have also enjoyed that this series treats human actions as less black and white.  For the most part, the villains have not been people who were evil because doing so was fun and profitable.  They have largely been people who have a noble goal, which has become twisted.  This is the way villains ought to be written; they should not know that they are doing bad things.  They should justify their actions with thoughts of the final outcome.  Certainly some people may suffer along the way, but we must persevere in order to bring freedom, equality, and peace to the world.  If you were turned off by the earlier seasons of Korra, I recommend that you come back.  Read a synopsis of the earlier seasons if you don't have time (or don't care) to watch them.  But Books 3 and 4 have been superb and deserve considerably more attention than they have received so far.

Playing: Crystal and I are still battling through hordes of enemies in Hyrule Warriors, working hard to improve our characters so that we can claim even greater prizes.  We met a major check a few weeks ago when we tried to take on the final boss, but we are nearly ready to try to defeat him again.  Most of our characters are several levels higher and have found several more heart containers.  Sheik is still the best powerhouse that we have, but we have improved many of the other characters as well.  I look forward to challenging Ganon a second time.

I'll be absent from the podcast this week due to my business trip, but I plan to return the following week with some fun stories about my brief trip to Canada.  Spoiler: I will probably eat at Tim Horton's at some point during the trip.  In any case, I'll let you all know what happens next week.