degrenerate... also a review of slam dunk movie 3

Don't know why I picked that title, but I'm inclined to let it stay. I got my degree in the mail last week, so I am now officially a degreed individual. It doesn't feel a whole lot different from before, with the exception that I feel consumed with an overpowering feeling of awesomeness. This summer has been otherwise uneventful. I chose to stay at home instead of going out into the world seeking internships, because I'm retarded. Hopefully the fact that I'm going to grad school in a month makes up for this stunning lack of ambition/direction/purpose in my life. In lieu of actual things that matter, I've been spending a lot of time with Slam Dunk lately. I've been watching the series again, mostly while I take exercise, and I've gone back to writing fan fiction and editing and re-uploading some of my older works. Playing basketball again seems to have strengthened the bond between me and Slam Dunk.

I still curse myself for deleting all my fics in 2011. I was not thinking straight. If I remember correctly, I had been going through some rough times at school, and felt that doing so would cause me to rethink my priorities in life. Getting rejected from Berkeley with a snicker at 3 in the morning may have precipitated this. As you might expect, my priorities didn't really change. Going through my old fan fiction folder on the cloud (where I've lately begun storing everything, because it's easier to access files from different places, and your files are also less likely to perish in a hard disk crash), I noticed that a lot of my older fics don't seem to be there anymore. I can't even tell if they were any good, because they're not there anymore. I seem to remember my hard disk crashing sometime in 2008 - but only vaguely. It's a little eerie and a little dizzying to think that none of those files exists anywhere anymore. You know they were real, you know they existed, but there is no way of making contact with them anymore. Sort of like Matthew McConaughey in Interstellar when he tries to talk to his daughter from that weird five-dimensional tesseract thing.

Anyhow, I'm reposting When the Clock Strikes One on FFn, because it was a marginally good fic that has the potential to be even better after being revised. I'm not done editing it, and will upload chapters at intervals. Depending on the demand and that sort of thing.

I've also been watching the Slam Dunk movies. I watched No. 4 earlier, but I don't think I watched the first three. Nos. 1 and 2 were pretty good. Watching No. 3 now. It's fucking weird. Watching it is like getting sucked into a weird fanfic. Michael Okita's a fucking Gary Stu. Ryokufu in general. So smug, so perfect, so... argh! This had better end like all Gary Stu/Mary Sue fics - in flames. The weird thing is, Michael Okita doesn't even seem like a Gary Stu compared to the Ryukufu manageress Eri. The spoilt daughter of the vice-principal is used to having her way, and she just can't stand it when the team decides to do things their way. When she loses it, she turns into what is known in academic circles as a "super bitch", and the rest of the team looks like a perfectly normal basketball team with normal, insouciant players. None of the general air of being on steroids that they were evincing earlier. But then Ryukufu goes from being smug and annoying to being excessively nice, and it's weird how they succeed in being Gary Stus at both extremes. "Let's have fun in the last five minutes!~~~" Seriously, who says that? Michael Okita, apparently. "Well, please come to play again! We'll play with you anytime!" It's like one of those gym leaders in Pokemon whom you can battle over and over after beating them the first time. This was a really weird movie, but somehow, like the others, it wasn't bad.