⚡ Animelit — Microblog

"Custard cream buns. Don't forget. In the end, that will be the reason" - Wind  Elemental, 4 Cut Hero

Today I was involved in planning a relative’s wedding and honestly even tho I am tired, it certainly beat attending someone’s wedding in terms of interest. #HFL

"All the universe or nothing"

Watched Things To Come (1936) H.G. Wells movie.

It's worth watching for the ending alone although what is notable is how manly the main characters are. This film displays quite well the manliness and romance of scientific progress. If it appears "smug and sentimental" to someone then that just means that they've already had all of the fight in them driven out and have turned into some kind of closeted nihilist. #HGWells

Went to Galle Face in Colombo, Sri Lanka. The skyline looks much more impressive than I last saw it but the beach could have been kept cleaner. My suggestion would be to have bins for people to throw garbage into and some police officer patrolling and giving small Rs.20 to Rs.50 fines to people who litter, oh and most importantly hire more staff to pick the garbage as well (this is actually more important than the fines - because seeing a clean place will discourage further littering). Galle Face is a centrepiece in how the country is viewed so I don't think it would be a bad place to start a clean image for the country.

Beyond that I do really want to visit the One Gale Face Mall. I am glad that at least part of the skyline is not occupied by yet another hotel which is too expensive to visit. A mall is much better because it is open to everyone, unlike a hotel where you need to book a room to go inside. The old world trade centre and central bank buildings (not pictured here) look rather pathetic now compared to the new buildings, whereas they used to look splendid to me when they were the most prominent, but they still look nice from another angle when viewed as the backdrop for the Old Parliament Building.

Driving in Colombo was not as awful as I expected though there could be improvements there too. The main problem is that people are allowed to park on the slow lane. Maybe this is a consequence of the lack of proper multi-storey car parks as well as on street car parking but I lost count of the number of times I had to change lanes because someone had parked their car on the road. I am aware that making car parking available will be no easy task but I believe it's the only way for a car-centric city to provide fast and safe traffic flow by avoiding drivers from having to make unnecessary lane changes.

One comment which someone I was with made was how few of the lights in the hotels were on... and quite frankly I don't understand what the appeal of staying in one of these hotels is, if indeed all these buildings are hotels. The view from the buildings is probably alright but the buildings are nicer to look at from the outside anyway. #HFL

"Transformation of intangible impulse of DESIRE into the tangible reality of MONEY calls for the use of a plan or plans. These plans must be formed with the aid of the imagination, and mainly the synthetic faculty." - Napoleon Hill, #TGR

I have been reading Napoleon Hill's Think & Grow Rich for two months now. What appealed to me was the inclusion of Desire as a necessary virtue for achieving success. Too many philosophies treat the negation of desire as a kind of virtue for achieving goals, BUT what is even the point of achieving a goal which you did not desire? It's just deception to pretend you don't desire something to remain calm and achieve it. In other words, at best, it's a kind of temporary dissociation to trick your own mind into giving you what you want from it. However, the truth is that this is a kind of unearned reprieve, because the reason why we evolved to have desires and obsessions is that we need them to survive and thrive. Discipline is remembering what you want so if you try to forget what you love and succeed to get rid of your desires then you might as well be dead, and if a civilisation falls for these ideas then it goes the same for it.

The man who has been active on the campus, whose personality is such that he gets along with all kinds of people and who has done an adequate job with his studies has a most decided edge over the strictly academic student. - Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich

Got on a Tuk-Tuk/Three Wheeler in a long time through uber in Sri Lanka. It was an unsafe and dusty ride as usual, but on the other hand, it was cheap. The ride arrived soon, which is not unexpected in the middle of Colombo.  #HFL

Reflections on:

Yearly Plan 2017

while sifting through the content of old pen drives I came across an article I wrote about ten year ago, dated 31.12.2016 and titled "Yearly Plan 2017".

So much has changed in ten years... I want to tell my past self, hang in there things will get better. I can't share the whole article because it is a bit too candid. Still I thought I might share some quotes from it. #HFL

Best philosophical / political quotes

“I can live in a world without Socialism (and no God) but I can’t live in a world without right and wrong.”

“Human beings must not be saints or tyrants.”

“Morality is chiefly something to regulate our own behaviour and not to order around other people.”

“The government of a free country does not decide what is the truth and therefore what is moral.”

“There has to be such a thing as objective truth, if not then Journalism is nothing more than misery porn and frothing at the mouth in righteous indignation.”

“There is no such thing as natural justice, at any rate in this world. So we make it for aesthetic reasons.”

“Just because the world is unfair that doesn’t mean that rapists, child molesters and murderers should be our rulers.”

“The temptation of faith are very high but I don’t want to be a cowardly opportunist.”

“Literature cannot change the world for the better.”

"However this doesn’t mean that all virtue is virtue-signalling."

"To blow it all to kingdom come, or not come, either way it’s-"

"The British government is planning to create A National Database of the Fetishes of Her Majesty’s subjects."

identity / self-awareness

“I am a cliché.”

“The self-effacing and the self-aggrandizing are not mutually exclusive.”

“Extreme diminutiveness is a sign of immense greed and arrogance and hubris.”

“I am getting tired of role-playing the writer.”

“I always keep holding up England to unreasonable moral standards and she always lets me down.”

“I can tell a lie when I see one and I can call an injustice one when I see one, but even if I go on eliminating lies and injustices I am left with too many things to choose from.”

"I am too arrogant to take the hand that tries to help me if there is nothing I can give in return."

aphoristic / concise lines

“A good epigram is better than a mediocre novel.”

“It’s either utopia or it’s nothing.”

“An end with a horror rather than a horror with no end.”

“Human solidarity is enough when co-dependence is not enough.”

“The only mode of existence is the aesthetic mode of existence.”

“Word count isn’t everything.”

“Some things are not just symbolic.”

“The more I dislike something the more real it is.”

vivid passages

“The carnival aspect of it all, the show, it’s getting boring, a dreadful long party, where guests are taken out at random to a firing squad… It’s like people are living in a loop and pretend not to realize it because other people are pretending not to realize it.”

“I must cram every work of art I can get a hold of into my cranium in this limited time.”

“When you have gotten used to all of this maybe death isn’t so bad assuming that there isn’t more.”

“It will take a few dozen decades before I get through everything I want to read… Consequently I might as well just hang around.”

young /intellectual/ in crisis

“Orwell was right.”

“Can you fall in love with a dead writer?”

“I don’t want to turn George Orwell into my go-to self-insert protagonist in my self-empowerment fantasy.”

“I am too fond of ‘the man’.”

miscellaneous

             "The self-effacing and the self-aggrandizing are not mutually exclusive, in-fact extreme diminutiveness is a sign of immense greed and arrogance and hubris. Making it a virtue to recognize how lacking in virtue one is and then wallowing in self-loathing, drowning in guilt while being intoxicated by self-pity. The acolyte or the hermit that rejects every earthly desire shows that his greed is such that it cannot be satiated by anything earthly so he settles for nothing or deludes himself with pure wishful fantasies. It’s much easier to get sick of people and things than you might think which is exactly all that these men have achieved, nothing more."

There's more but these are some of the more mild ones which I felt were not too embarrassing to post. My thoughts? Well, a lot has changed. For one, George Orwell is no longer a great author I look up to as an ideal. He's just an alright essayist.

In general I have become more tolerant of myself and of others, because I am more fine with myself and others being selfish with their desires. I don't know if I am totally fine with reclusive people who ran away and take snipes at society, but if they can shut up and not act like they are superior.... no even if they act superior I just don't care about what they d0. More than anything I have become more pragmatic about things like faith. Namely that without faith in one's self it's hard to have courage because reason alone can't give you enough certainty. And that the way to create faith is through auto-suggestion and repetition of both action and thoughts.

Not every problem I had in 2016-17 has been resolved, but, finally I feel like I am on the right path to be decisive and resolve things one way or another, and have the strength to be fine with the outcome of my choices based on my chief desires.

As for the spectre of politics haunting my writing like a bad miasma, I do fall back into bad habits from time to time but politics is no longer a key aspect of my identity. I have lived through too many political disasters since then, and yet come out the other end alive, so I do not regard it as be-all and end-all subject of art or my thinking and writings.

[ This paragraph is an aside about internet safety: Of course, I would have said that politics is just a side-show back then too but given the time I spent listening to political podcasts on a certain video sharing platform, I certainly did not live like that was the case. I may have become both more conservative and liberal at the same time. For example, I can say "I told you so," about the online safety act and other changes which have occurred but I have seen change and I have seen life go on after it, moreover although I believe I have gained more than lost through the internet, I don't have much sympathy for the corporations who are being regulated either. Still I am the same person, so at heart, I cannot say I believe in neither official state-management of the internet or in the oft repeated mantra and panacea about how parents should be in charge of their children's internet usage. To be frank, now that it's all in the past, for me the internet was the best escape from the control of adults; so ultimately it doesn't matter to me if the role of the controlling adults is played by the state, parents or corporations. Ideally I believe in those policies which put the control of the lives of people in their own hands as soon as possible because that's how you create independent adults, but I am also aware that we are all susceptible to influences of others, especially children, and so there needs to be "sensible defaults" on these internet platforms which disable features like infinite scroll, short videos, algorithmic recommendations by default. The difference between me and the current social reformers, is that I believe that anyone should have the right to enable those features one-by-one if they so wish. All intelligent children wish to some extent be treated like adults, and it is because they can't be taken seriously offline that they turn to the internet where age doesn't matter as much (for now), of course they cannot fully get that wish to be treated as adults, but I don't think ignoring their agency like this will lead to their proper development. #InternetSafety ]

In any case, I have abandoned writing purely self-reflective writing like this because writing likes this goes in a loop and does not lead to much action. Still this article I wrote on the last day of 2016 was a tiny step, a start, or even a prelude to a start to my current actions, and I couldn't be here without those so I am grateful I indulged in these sentimental writings. For the time being I will back them up somewhere so I won't lose them and clear my usb pen drives for other uses. And  from now on I would rather put those emotional words into the mouths of fictional characters than mine.

Drove an automatic car for the first time today. Was alright except in very slow traffic where I had to constantly change gears to neutral. Thankfully we took the expressway so it was fine.

Also tried Google maps on Android Auto on my way back home.  Quite nifty. Wish my car back in the UK had it too so the screen in there would not be purely decorative except for the rear camera.

#HFL

All achievement, no matter what may be its nature or its purpose, must begin with an intense BURNING DESIRE for something definite. -  Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich

Struck up a conversation with a backpacker from south England coming to Sri Lanka. Apparently he is going to help the sea turtles lay their eggs or something. He had to run across the overgrown mall that is Instanbul airport and asked me if I had internet to connect to his friend in SL. Seemed like a nice lad of about twenty-five, answered some of his questions about Sri Lanka throughout the flight. Asked for my WhatsApp and last I texted he’s doing fine and was excited for his journey despite the heat. Wished more people were talkative as him, made the flight much less boring than it would be otherwise.

Watched a couple Japanese movies on the flight too.

exit 8 was a neat concept and I think I have seen YouTube shorts with the same concept but at the same time it was a bit simplistic theme wise, in a feel good kind of way.

Rewrite and I have a S/E/C/R/E/T  are both high school romance movies with something supernatural about them slightly. But you can read the synopsis in the screenshots.

Riraito/rewrite is unsurprisingly based on a novel given how the prominent role which novels play in it kind of romanticised being a novelist.  Even tho it came out in 2025, it felt kind of nostalgic which also makes sense since the book is from 2012. It’s also nostalgic because you get to see the characters in their high school years but also as adults grumbling about getting older. The successful novelist main character is married as well and the character who plays her is 30.

As for I have a secret it felt like more straightforwardly a movie aimed at high schoolers rather than people who have been to high school. As for the novel it’s been adapted from, it’s by the same author as I want to eat your pancreas, which also got adapted to a semi-popular anime movie which I will release a blog post about.

The limited film selection on flight entertainment systems forces me to watch Japanese films which I would otherwise overlook, and which I have heard nothing about. This is one of the things I look forward to the most when going on a flight. Honestly I don’t even know if there is a way to watch these movies online, but as a note for my future self I will say right now that I don’t feel like any of these films are worth rewatching. Maybe once I learn to read Japanese then I can read the novels but I doubt it’ll happen cause to truly enjoy them you need to have the time on your hands and lack of urgency which I lack these now. Like I am too bothered about paying my bills and other stuff than to worry about micromanaging the relationships with school friends which is kind of what the characters in I have a secret do. I also think a major obstacle to my enjoyment is also that I no longer feel like the bonding youthful activitities which the characters engage in, like going on a school trip or watching fireworks at a local festival (in riraito), to be that interesting or desirable. In fact, I view them as tropes in fiction at this point to understand them. Although I will say that the hero show play which the students put up in the I have a secret looked pretty fun and was certainly the best scene in the film. I can’t say that I found the character’s speech about how, the saddest thing is when people can’t forgive themselves for their mistakes,  to be particularly compelling but maybe I would have if I was younger, because it would have been the truth then.

I have not entirely disawoved myself  from the view that the youth knows what the truth is because they haven’t grown numb to life yet and they possess the right instincts towards life. So I do wonder what the cast feels like in productions like these. Obviously it’s a show put on by older adults, and the fact that they are acting out their youth in public as a performance actually separates them from the ‘true’ experience of youth untainted by performative acts informed by nostalgia of the author. On the other hand they have been handpicked to represent the best and ideal and most momentous version of youth which the intended audience is either supposed to long for or see themselves in already. So much of fiction is informed by the thought of the demographic it is aimed, a thought which states: “Wouldn’t it be cool if x happened…’

i guess the distinguishing feature of this youth themed stories is not that the characters are not goal oriented but rather that their goals are oriented towards their school relationships and romances, even when there is some other distant goal what it serves is the goal of furthering the bonds between the characters. I guess it’s because your friend relationships are the most important when you are in school.

i hear people who didn’t do well in school socially say that it never changes, and perhaps it is so, but the earnestness with which people seek each other certainly changes, as our goals and priorities change to become more financially and career motivated. There are advantages to this, and the wisdom of maturity comes from an habituation to unwelcome and welcome changes, we play the long game as each days gets shorter and less unique, but the price is the intensity of feeling which is unique to first time youthful encounters which can never be replicated, even if you were a god who could return to your youth. Speaking of Gods, if such beings were to exist I wonder if they feel things faintly or at all and whether they are just numb to everything due to a lack of new experiences or thoughts or feelings. Could a god feel first love ever again? That would explain the indifference to suffering in the world but then again I am no theologian or philosopher…

The time looper is also inherently a kind of minor analogy to a god in that sense, although in riraito the boy from the future doesn’t seem to grow tired of people just because he is repeating the same script with multiple different characters. However, as for me, I felt a bit bored, because I had already seen it done, although in not exactly the same exact details, in Steins;Gate.

#HFL

no one ever is defeated until defeat has been accepted as a reality. - Napoleon Hill,

Visited the Ninewells hospital's medical university section. It was like a maze in there. I could easily get lost. All the entrances are sealed with fireproof doors, but escaping through them during a fire might be a pain if you don't already know the layout. I spoke with a researcher there, and it seems even his supervisor isn't familiar with the proper routes. Still, precisely because of that maze-like structure, it seemed like a cool place to be in. There were plenty of medical students lounging around. The researcher's own lab was kind of cramped and full of cables and audio-related equipment, #HFL

Went to a Japanese group study session. It was fun for me but it was only fun because I already knew the definitions of the vocabulary we tested each other on. A nice extra which can't replace input-based solo study. #HFL

Went to Edinburgh Weaverley station yesterday to buy anime related stuff.

Bought Anime blurays from HMV and Fopp. Got 10% off using a bar code in the unidays app.

Visited a model shop called Wanderland Models. Had little gunpla but good prices.

Visited Forbidden Planet. They had some nice figurine Haruhi tucked away in an inconspicuous place. Manga selection was kinda small but they had 3 for the price of 2 promotion. The student discount doesn’t apply for the 2 for 3 deal cause “it’s already discounted.” They also have more and better gunpla tho prices seemed higher. Store is a bit small so it gets crowded easily.

Visited Anime Republic which is a anime merch store near the train station again. There were some decent looking things like keychains but anime hoodies seemed kind of cheaply made. Also a friend told me their merch is not official but I couldn’t say just by looking at it. There were some tables at the back where some people seemed to be playing a trading card game.

Went to Happy Lamb hot pot to eat a hot pot style buffet. It filled me up but not sure it tasted good enough for £36, the “ulitmate” meal. Maybe I should check the cheaper meals. I wouldn’t have minded paying £24 for a similar meal. My friend thought staff was kind of cold compared to last time he was there but I didn’t notice it, though I struggled to communicate with them cause both staff and I have a thick accent. What I can say however is that it kinda felt like a race cause of the 100 minute limit. There was only one set of tongs so it was kinda annoying having to share it, as was keeping track of what I and others put into the hot pot. Still definitely worth trying at least once. The best food was the Wagyu which honestly didn’t taste that different than normal beef for me but then again I like beef. The worst food I put in the hot pot was the eggplant noodles. Go for udon.

Finally went to Blackwell’s bookshop after getting the road wrong a bit cause Edinburgh is not a flat city, at least not this part. By far the best manga and book selection. I wanted to buy the Genki Japanese textbook but it was like £60 or thereabouts. Far more expensive than online.

Heard there might be some anime collab merch at uniqlo but was too tired to go there by this point.

The whole trip cost £200 which included 3 blurays (steins gate, code geass season 1&2, and Gunbuster) and three omnibus volumes 1-3 for £46

When a friend asked me what does "Wakarimasen" mean I replied "I don't understand" without even thinking about it. #HFW

HOW TO OUTWIT THE SIX GHOSTS OF FEAR from Think & Grow Rich #TGR

SYMPTOMS OF THE FEAR OF DEATH

The general symptoms of this fear are:

• The habit of THINKING about dying instead of making the most of LIFE, due, generally, to lack of purpose or lack of a suitable occupation.

• This fear is more prevalent among the aged, but sometimes the more youthful are victims of it.

• The greatest of all remedies for the fear of death is a BURNING DESIRE FOR ACHIEVEMENT backed by useful service to others.

• A busy person seldom has time to think about dying.

• He finds life too thrilling to worry about death.

• Sometimes the fear of death is closely associated with the Fear of Poverty, where one’s death would leave loved ones poverty-stricken.

• In other cases, the fear of death is caused by illness and the consequent breaking down of physical body resistance.

• The most common causes of the fear of death are ill-health, poverty, lack of appropriate occupation, disappointment over love, insanity, religious fanaticism.

the text later goes on to say that decisiveness just as ardent desire is also a cure for this fear of death. In other words: “Relieve yourself forever of the fear of death by reaching a decision to accept death as an inescapable event.”

THE SEVEN MAJOR POSITIVE EMOTIONS (according to Napoleon Hill). #TGR

The emotion of DESIRE
The emotion of FAITH
The emotion of LOVE
The emotion of SEX
The emotion of ENTHUSIASM
The emotion of ROMANCE
The emotion of HOPE

Watched the Moonlight Sonata Murder Case (Episode 11) of Detective Conan.. It's real pity there isn't anywhere to comment along episode to episode. Some of the websites like Kissanime used to have hundreds of comments. Watching this along with a bunch of commenters would have really been fun. It's a thousand episodes so I doubt I can convince anyone I know to watch it either. I feel tempted to stream it online on the server but what if no one joins. Maybe I can find some Detective Conan server.

Even with 48 minutes (so two episodes) for the case, it still felt too short and it didn't hit as hard as when I read the manga. I suspect it's because I have seen too many anime, sometimes I wish I could unsee the anime I have watched so I could look at it again with fresh eyes. Then again I felt like the manga did a better job of explaining the case, like I didn't feel like there was any aspect of the case which I did not understand. Then again maybe I was just too young to realise there were gaps in my memory. The idea that Dr. Narumi/Seiji was cross-dressing never came to mind when I first read it, I mean the idea that there could be men who passed for women itself was alien to my grade schooler mind after all. The tragedy that Aso's suicide message was telling his son to lead a honest life but that it was too late just hit a lot harder back then didn't hit as hard, maybe I have become a bit and heartless after seeing too many tragedies both real and fictional. Come to think of why was Seiji using the same music code sheet as his father if he had never come across his will before. I went back and checked the manga, apparently it was the previous mayor who told him about the code but then I wonder why the previous mayor didn't try to destroy the suicide message by Aso. Maybe I could write a better mystery though I am probably just feeling a bit cocky today.

I wrote a note to my neighbours upstairs because they were too noisy. Let's see if it works. #HFW