Revisiting Reading

 

When I was younger, I used to love reading.

As a child, I was always picking books at school to read. Whether it was from the little selection we had in one of my classes in junior school, or picking things from the school library to read in secondary school.

Most of the time, I found I was mainly drawn to stories about animals. My favourite book series as a child was actually 'The Animals of Farthing Wood', which I got into through the BBC animated series based on the books. Though, as a teenager I also loved reading books based on my favourite show at that age, which was the X Files. I remember how much I loved picking up new stories based on the series when I saw them.

Though as I've gotten older, I've found that I fell out of the habit of reading. I feel it was probably a combination of adult life and other hobbies that took more priority that made me fall out from the habit.

Lately though, I've really been wanting to get back into it.

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The Journey Starts Today!

When I first got into Pokémon, it was the anime that gave me my very first experience of the franchise, rather than the games. I quickly became hooked on the adventures of Ash, Pikachu and friends as they travelled around the Pokémon world, while being tailed by Team Rocket. I'd watch every new episode on the Sky One channel in the UK back then and found them incredibly fun and entertaining.

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The Rice Ball in a Fruits Basket

When I was in my early twenties, I was going through my 'I'll watch anything if it's anime' phase. I remember often buying random anime DVDs if the premise of the show sounded interesting enough to me. One of these shows ended up being the original 2001 anime of 'Fruits Basket'.

I watched the whole series, which sadly only covered a small part of the manga, so I ended up reading the manga too. I think it's possibly the only long-running manga series' that I ever managed to finish reading from start to finish. I was hooked on the touching storyline and it's something that just really stuck with me since.

When they announced they were making a new anime that was going to cover the entire manga story, I was incredibly happy. It was definitely a series I wanted to see fully animated, plus it had been so long since I read the manga, I didn't really remember all of it, so the new anime allowed me to once again relive this amazing story. 

The rest of the blog will contain minor spoilers for the series, but I've tried to keep them at a minimum so not to spoil too much.

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To Further New Horizons

As of March 20th 2021, it's been a whole year since Animal Crossing New Horizons released and helped a lot of us to get through the (sadly still ongoing) pandemic.
During the first year, we had fairly frequent updates which introduced the seasonal events, but now a whole year has passed, what updates could they have planned for the second year of the game to keep interest?

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Pokémon and Me

Pokémon has been a very important part of my life for a very long time and it's amazing to think that it's celebrating 25 years this year! This franchise has helped me meet friends, has given me something that I can turn too after a hard day just to relax and so much more!

For the 25th anniversary, I thought I'd ramble a little about my experience and memories of Pokémon as someone who's been a fan since it's first arrival in the UK!

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The Power of Science is Amazing!

 

Every year, I like to try and watch at least one anime show I've never seen before. 

I tend to be a bit picky with the anime I watch these days. Long gone are the days as a young twenty-something where I'd watch anything if it was anime. I don't have as much time to dedicate to something like that anymore afterall.

I have a habit of sticking to series' I know and love; Pokémon, Yu-Gi-Oh!, Digimon... but it's nice to branch out every now and then because you never know what you will enjoy. That said, a series has to really capture my attention to watch it, whether it's through seeing trailers or seeing others talk about a specific series.

In previous years I've watched things like The Ancient Magus' Bride and The Promised Neverland which I both thoroughly enjoyed and are series' I would continue watching beyond their first seasons (though I have only seen episode 1 of season 2 of The Promised Neverland as of writing, but it's on the watch list.)

This year, I decided to choose to watch Dr. STONE. I'd been meaning to give it a try as the concept intrigued me and I'd seen a few people talk about it and share artwork on Twitter. With the second season 'STONE WARS' approaching at the time and myself eager to give a new series a go, I decided to gradually start watching season 1.

I definitely wasn't disappointed.

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Crossing and Coronavirus

Like quite a lot of people, Animal Crossing is proving a godsend for getting me through the pandemic year of 2020.

I'm no stranger to the game. The first Animal Crossing game I ever played was Animal Crossing New Leaf on the Nintendo 3DS. It was recommended to me as a game I would like, so I got it and was hooked on it for months. So as you can imagine, I was very much looking forward to New Horizons on the Switch, unaware of how much I was going to end up relying on this game to help distract myself and get through one of strangest years I've ever experienced.

That said, we're only through just over half the year. There's still five months of 2020 left. The pandemic and the resulting ‘new’ normal could even go on beyond 2020.

This is a blog about my personal experience with the Covid-19 lockdown and social distancing, as well as what I’ve been doing on Animal Crossing to help my anxiety during it.

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