Weeknotes: week 36, 2023
✱ I can finally say, 61 episodes later, that I’ve finished One Piece: East Blue Arc, the equivalent to the anime’s first season. When watching so many episodes in a row it is impossible not to deal with filler episodes, such as the Warship Island arc, but luckily One Piece is known to have few episodes like this — little less than 10% of the 1,000+ aired so far. Besides, the story is so amazing and filled with charismatic characters, and all the main ones have solid background stories, what is very appealing. In short, I loved it. And this means I’ll keep on watching Luffy and the Strawhat Pirates’ adventures.
✱ I’ve watched All Quiet on the Western Front, much because of my younger son’s insistence, as he loves history, geography… and war related subjects. This movie tells the story of Paul Bäumer, a young boy who enlists the German Army with his best friends to fight during World War I, only to find that his romantic view of the war — glory and heroism — is soon replaced with the realities of war, that is, deaths, despair and hopelessness. Paul then replaces his dreams of becoming a war hero with his best efforts to survive. This type of movie is not my cup of tea, yet I need to admit that it looks very pleasing to watch, and it narrates war in a way I’ve never seen before, I mean, from the POV of common soldiers, what contributes a lot to its antiwar message. I can recommend it.
✱ Brazilian food is filled with unique dishes. From brigadeiro to coxinha — both delicious, by the way, there are so many goodies that you can taste here. This week, though, me and a couple of friends from work decided to eat pastel prepared in a street market, something that I hadn’t done for some time. As delicious as difficult to explain in English, its Wikipedia description says pastel is a Brazilian street food consisting of half-circle or rectangle-shaped thin crust pies with assorted sweet fillings and fried in vegetable oil (equal to the picture I placed above). More than the delicious taste of pastel, though, the most important thing to me was to collect yet another good memory with my friends. Amazing.
✱ I’ve accumulated 10 books that I’m currently reading and maybe, maybe not, you’re going to believe I’ve gone completely out of my mind. I also think so… it’s a real exaggeration, I know, but all of this happens because I’m addicted to reading and I cannot keep this impulse of buying and starting to read new books at stake (again, tsundoku). I’ve bought Holly, the newest book from Stephen King — who, by the way, I believe is maybe the greatest storyteller alive — in pre-ordering because I just cannot pass without reading anything he publishes, but ended up buying and reading… Assombrando Adeline, which called my attention for being at the #1 place in Amazon’s psychological thrillers list (a genre that I appreciate reading) and made me debut . I haven’t finished it yet but this decision of reading the book made me debut in the dark romance genre as well. This is not a genre for everyone, as it deals with things like death, mobs, kidnapping and many other disturbing themes. I’m liking it so far — although the Brazilian Portuguese translation of the ebook sold by Amazon is sufferable with all its errors, typos and machine-like translation, making me believe that Google probably translated it —, to the point of having read 80% of the content in 2 days, a real page turner.