Bye-bye 2016!

[davetheanalyzer]

The end of the year has come. I’ve completed and passed both of my last Quinnipiac classes with A’s and steadily submitted all the documents needed to get into the Southern CT State University MFA program. Apparently, most of the classes that have to do with writing have already been taken, so I’ll have to make do with electives whether I get into the program or not. I’m still in contact with my advisor and Senior Sem professor and will inform him if I get into the MFA program.

In anticipation of my Quinnipiac email getting shutdown, I set up another email account and transferred most of my active online accounts to that. I’ve had some of them attached to my mother’s email since I didn’t think to set up an personal email for the longest time and I thought all that was available was gmail. Fortunately, I finally got the idea to google around to see where I could get a free email address and set everything up the same day. I’ll tell my Quinnipiac professors to contact me with that email if they want to talk to me for any reason. I don’t expect to get much messages that don’t somehow relate to school business, but I guess it’s common courtesy anyway.

In other news, last week I’ve finally begun doubling up on news shows as I talked I would. Doing that with one show ends up taking more time than I thought it would. Since it’s an hour long show, I thought it would take four hours to watch through two of the shows. Instead, it took sometimes as long as six hours. I surmise that had to do with the reading and art routines I do during those times. Since I took a week off from my usual routine to focus on getting all my classwork in, I had to catch up with one activity or another. I’ve caught up, and it still remains a problem but I’ll see I can get better at it.

In addition, I’ve dropped one news program and a podcast. I’m already in my late twenties, so I need to make room for adulting duties and school. With such narrowing time, I need to pick and choose what I watch, and the two sources I watch and read the most I trust pretty much. At least now the family DVR has some additional space. The podcast decision is a bit more tentative but since I want to shave an extra hour of my weekend watches and so the podcast seems like the one that’ll get the ax.

On the bright side, I might have more time to watch some of the monster movie DVDs I’ve bought the past several years and then neglected to watch. This should serve to reawaken my inspiration when I’m writing Godzilla and/or Gamera fic, and possibly give me more human and monster characters to write about. Many of the movies do end in a manner where it can be vague whether the monsters have died or not and like with comic books, there are ways to get around much more explicit death scenes, so I can set the stories postcanon if I want.

The past few episodes of Digimon Universe Appli Monsters have stirred a bit of my old Digimon passion with how good they are. The beginning episodes were descent but the episodes that followed with Eri and Astra joining weren’t as good. Though I like their characters and their partners, and can see their potential, their catchphrases can be grating. The followup episodes to their introduction could have explored their characters better. But the last episodes did raise the stakes with some great action and character moments from Haru and Rei. Eri and Astra seem of kind of hangers-on but they got some good moments too.

Despite the Christmas episode seeming like a light breather pause, some important moments happened there too. Haru’s crush Ai got some development, she finds out about the Appmon, and that leads to the Applidrivers getting a secret base. There were hints at the end that the plot was going to start picking up and I look forward to what drama happens next. The preview for the next episode doesn’t indicate much but previous previews have hidden the drama to come before and I wouldn’t be surprised if the can be said for now.

Saw Moana this month. Though formulaic in some respects, the characters were engaging. Moana in particular felt like an actual teenager with hopes and wants and flaws, helped by being voiced by a teenage actress. The action and humor often hit the mark, even at a rapid-fire pace and I came out having enjoyed myself. I wonder if Moana will join the frequent crossovers between Disney, Pixar, and Dreamworks properties that involve child and teen characters of similar ages. I’ve not delved into those too closely but they look fun and hopefully Moana’s character would be treated well.

With 2016 coming to a close, I can look back and be proud that I actually started posting fic. Granted, a lot of it’s material I already wrote and finally got around to editing and posting but I’m glad I was able to post anything at all. I didn’t post a fic a month like promised too all the way through the year but I made much more progress than I did in 2015.

With the next year I’m aiming to be able to post around six or so fics, with the goal of getting out We Will Hold On Forever before the end of that year. I might need to speed up my writing in order to accomplish all of that within a single year. So I might have to change some of my watching, reading, and writing habits I’ve been sustaining for years. I probably said this before but gradually I’ve been changing some of those habits bit by bit and the next year might be no different. Who knows what the entry for the end of 2017 will be like?

It looks like the next four or so years are going to be hell with what our two party system threw up. As an Autistic working class person, I’m wary of what resources are going to be cut, since it’s always the marginalized that get sacrificed the most in a crises and now the gloves might come off. I don’t know how this’ll effect my ability to access information, attend graduate school, or cut into my writing time, but if any entries are delayed or I don’t post in a while, it might have something to do with the current U.S. government. Hopefully we can all get through this and maybe even kick out the rightwing monsters in office, whether they wear their monstrousness on their sleeve or not.   

That’s all I can think of talk about for now. 2016 was a good year in some personal accomplishments but not so much in world affairs. Here’s hoping 2017 will be much better. By the end of January, there might be an update on my graduate school situation and what progress I made on my writing, among other matters. Until that time, a happy new year!