My Thoughts on Derek (the TV show)

Full disclosure, I really like Ricky Gervais's tv shows, but I don't care for his public persona or his stand up. I've watched a lot of what he has put out, and I've learned to ignore his public character. I get it. He's pulling a Kaufman. His pointed and obscene comments are a part of the public persona of Gervais. It's the Gervais that sell. I don't really like it, but I do like his series. Ultimately, I always give his works a shot because I know what he's capable of. I mean, come on, he created The Office, which is one of the best series created. And his other stuff up to this point (Extras, Life's Too Short, and The Ricky Gervais Show) has been of varying quality--ranging form okay to pretty stinking good.

Derek, on the other hand, is the greatness that I've been waiting for since The Office.

NaNoWriMo 2013: The Sophomore Slump

So I did it again. I subjected myself to 30 days of committed writing on a singular work, and I wrote a large part of a novel. I went into NaNoWriMo this year with a few different goals some of which I achieved and some of which I failed to fulfill. My main goals were as follows: 

1. No literary fiction this time. I wanted to try something outside of my wheelhouse.  
2. 2000 words a day for total of 60K (last year's goal was 50K)
3. A multi-perspective story

Work: Micro Fiction

-His wife slept in a frigid bed: he worked late.

-His work friends are nice, but his birthday party was barren. 

-Slapping the alarm clock, he escaped back to fakelife. 

Ender's Saga Reminds Me of the Rambo Series

I started reading Ender's Game on the flight to Tanzania at the beginning of the summer. For the last couple of years, people encouraged me to give the book a chance. My pal James Casey even let me borrow his copy of the book for like a year, but when he moved, I returned it to him in the same condition in which I received the book; I hadn't took the book off my shelf. I wasn't interested in the series because I didn't have a clue what it was about. It looked like generic science fiction, and I honestly don't want to read generic anything.

Attack on Titan Is Pretty Good

I stopped watching anime in my late teens/early twenties. Somewhere around that age, I figured out that anime has a ton of repeated tropes and cliches from which the genre is built. Figuring out these tropes was once exciting and new, but just like RomComs, once I knew the formula, the content lost it's luster.  And while the animation is impressive, after a while, most anime begins to look like carbon copies of each other.  Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to poopoo on anime because there are plenty of anime series and movies that I have fond memories of watching (if a may name a few: Ninja Scroll, Samurai Champloo, Dragon Ball Z, and Berserk). But I'm skeptical when anyone recommends that I watch an anime.