It's a blog!

After nudging my sister to write her own blog, I figured I should do my own, hence

The Wonderings Of  A Strange Man

I'm 27, I'm British and I currently live and work in Germany, for which I can't really talk about, but what am I going to talk about, well, it's going to be a odd ride kids!

I like to call myself eccentric, I'm very very much a geek in pretty much any sense of the word, I'm a big kid, pure and simple, video games, cartoons, fantasy and sci-fi, yep I'm pretty much there!

So now then, first bloggy post, I will try to make this as often as I can but life and work can get in the way so sometimes there may not be a post for a while!

First things to note, I'm gay, people get so surprised when I tell them, they tell me things like 'you don't act gay', 'you don't look gay' and 'you don't sound gay', well my apologies if I don't fall into the stereotype and just perhaps I've had to adapt myself into the situation I'm in, I can act straight if I need to, but when I do come out as gay don't start prodding and poking it trying to make it out like it's a lie.

Blargh, needn't be so serious on first blog, this is supposed to be fun!, right?

So might'as well go on about what I've been doing recently.

I've been a fan of Anime for a while now, but I've been saying to some friends that I've been in want of an Anime series which doesn't need a month or two's worth of catch-up to get into it with the rest of the fan-base for said show, I used to watch Naruto and Bleach, when I last watched them they were at around the 300 episode mark, today? make that more than 600, if you're just discovering them it's so daunting to have this mountain of episodes to watch to be 'up to speed'.

Then I discover

Fullmetal Alchemist

Having known about it for a few years but never really seen it I got provided the 64 episode entire run of 'Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood' by my boyfriend, 64 episodes, the entire thing, so I can watch the show in a relatively short space of time and get the full appeal of the show without any 'filler' or 'in-between' episodes that other anime's thrive on when the story's abit scarce.

So what the heck is it about?

It's about two brothers, Edward and Alphonse Elric who are on a quest to find a philosophers stone so they can 'get their bodies back', but... why?

In this world Alchemy is a well known and oft practiced art, be it for medicine or as a tool of war, it works on the law of 'Equivalent Exchange' basically you get out what you put in.

The Elric brothers committed the most heinous of Alchemic sins, they tried to perform 'Human Transmutation', they lost their mother due to a illness and they decide that they could bring her back to life using Alchemy, but what could be equivalent to a human soul?

The process goes horrifically wrong, Edward loses his leg but Alphonse loses his entire body, in his desperation Edward sacrifices his right arm to bind Alphonse's soul to a suit of armour.

Retreating to family friends broken and traumatized by the events they try to piece together what little they have left, Edward is able to get prosthetic for his missing limbs but Alphonse is stuck as a suit of armour, unable to feel, sleep and eat, just a voice and memories, nothing more.

One day by chance Edward is selected by the military to become a 'State Alchemist', essentially a solider, Edward and Alphonse seek the chance to learn more about alchemy and to find out about the philosophers stone, something which if you possess it, you can create anything without the need to sacrifice anything.

Gosh I ramble on a bit, but it's hard to explain, plus whilst it all sounds doom and gloom it's actually a very well thought out series, it has a great string of humour and light heartedness to contrast the sometimes very dark and quite brutal scenes, the compact length of the series means that the story moves along rapidly keeping the tension going and providing some very well thought out characters and scenes, it's a terrific watch and I look forward to watching the rest of this series, as of right now I'm about half way through and I like it that much I've blabbed on about it here! Haha!