Poetry

Street

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They lay bare

Stood apart from buildings that once wished to scrape the sky

Trampled and skidded

Those days when people go

Passing through them

Honking the rush and bumpers

Now lay hot in the day and cold at night

For life to once again breathe onto it

Footsteps echoing more than ever

Anime/Drama/Movie Review

[Korean Drama] Memories of Alhambra

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Oh where should I start? Spoilers ahead!

aaa

 

For fellow anime watcher, this is the SAO-esque drama with the flaw of plot holes along the way. This is a story of an IT owner CEO Jin Woo flying over to Alhambra to buy a VR fighting game with the complication of a bugged game.

The whole drama was full of jumping timeline and repeating flashbacks, contributing to minor confusions and unnecessary time wasted in the scenes we have already seen it (even worse than filler episodes of anime, at least they entertain) by twice or more. The CG was good, no doubt. And I could even applaud the action director, there were good fight scenes with the sword and their costumes were complete. The actors were good and the romantic plot line moves so much faster than the main story.

There were a few point into the drama where I could just disagree with the writing direction:

  1. Deaths by in-game defeat felt flaky when they were faced with real life police and forensic sciences. Why? And how did the officer just assume everything? Logical flaw was thrown away while they pushed the story forward or by setting it aside with characters’ action. (Proper story would probably started blaming the developing game, causing bankruptcy of their company before more people die)
  2. Developer Se Joo after accidentally killing his partner Marco did not call the police or anything even when he realize he might be dead (body found long after that). Killer guilt was instilled when he came back after one year, a 365 days too late when he went into hiding.
  3. Hee Joo, the eldest daughter with the tragic story fells for the guy, just because she could? Empathy and ‘this is the savior that saved us’ feeling made our female heroine fully supporting Jin Woo. She did good in terms of story line, contributing a lot of tears and worry to the audience.
  4. Emma as NPC but held the main key to kill bug and reset the game system. For a game creator, it felt stupid to ‘award’ your top player with level 100 to this unless you already knew your system was going to kill someone. And besides, the pioneer developer could be the source of bug when they fought in Emma’s presence, Jin Woo as bug just isn’t justifiable (Oh yeah, the main character was deleted in game).
  5. Mr Cha side story was nice but the whole plotting to get the police arrest Jin Woo was too over the top. He serves the purpose to get the story there and that was it. Wasted gum after multiple chews.
  6. Se Joo just came out of his hiding and arriving home. Marco should be one of the bugs since Jin Woo was ‘deleting’ them (all the dead people caused by the game). An addition of ‘killing’ Marco with the Key of Heaven should be in before Se Joo could reach home.
  7. Jin Woo’s corpse should be there to be align with the previous death. Se Joo’s explanation where he could be in another dimension doesn’t make sense when Jin Woo’s ash was detected after the ‘bug terminating’ ceremony. Simple way to put it: Bug=ash=dead=corpse. If they wanted to make him disappear in the game, that ash is not supposed to be there.
  8. Reappearance in game of Jin Woo by the end of the series and the belief of Hee Joo that he is alive could only mean that he ‘survived’ in game, probably not in real life.

 

My mind was rejecting the whole idea while I watch the last few episodes. It was a good idea, nice setting and background with believable characters but the story did not live up to its potential. Shy away from it if you rely heavily on logical plot.

 

P/S: I apologize if I barely make sense, this needs to get out of my system. Oh how I hated the pent up feeling. Let’s move on!

 

 

Thoughts

Loud in the Cloud

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Ever since the whole world started the quarantine and social distancing in fighting the Covid 19, there has been more and more noise migrating from the real world to the web.

People having more time online by working from home, news sharing with both true and fake ones are being circulated at a much higher speed compared to the usual pace. Your messages becomes short, intermittent yet persistent as more people gets gitty or even just plain bored with increasing hours indoor.

I could almost feel the extrovertion boiling underneath and turned out to be less comfortable than I’d expected this movement restriction could pose upon us.

My attention span gets ruined by switching focus from one place to another. Every time I pick up my phone and saw the notifications stacked up, it triggers my mental set of checklist before I cleared everything at one go. And then they just drain out my focus for a few minutes while I skip from watsapp, facebook and social media with a tinge of games. Before all this happens, I rarely have notification in my phone.

Even with working from home, I even dreaded my boss messaging and calling me if I did not reply in her patience tolerated duration (means within ten minutes, oh gosh). I woke up as usual and sat beside my phone to settle all the questions she threw at me. But you’d think you’d be done by noon, she pops up again asking other issues.

I think I should declutter and get blogging back on track, less distractions and more ‘me time’. Until then, stay healthy everyone.