shinin'

I’ve only seen two of these films so far since not all are subbed in English yet, but I have it in good faith that they will all be very good, so here they are, that you may know of them and seek them out.

I don’t have much time today, so I will only give some minor details and standard summary with these recommendations, plus my personal ratings which you may take as you like.

A Silent Voice

A deaf elementary school girl, Shoko Nishimiya, upon transferring, meets a boy named Shoya Ishida in her new class. Shoya, who is not deaf, leads the class in bullying Shoko, because she is deaf. As the bullying continues, the class starts to bully Shoya for bullying Shoko. After graduating from elementary school, Shoko and Shoya do not speak to each other… until later, when Shoya, tormented over his past, decides he must see Shoko once more. Shoya wants to make amends for what he did in elementary school and be Shoko’s friend.

A story with excellent character portrayal and development. 5/5

Napping Princess/Ancien and the Magic Tablet

A young girl dreams of a world called Heartland, a place where she has magic powers. When her events in Heartland begin to parallel her waking world, she realizes that she will have to outmaneuver the bad guys in both worlds.

Lu Over the Wall

The story centers on Kai, a gloomy middle school student whose life changes after meeting Lu, a mermaid.

The Breadwinner

A headstrong girl in Afghanistan dresses like a boy to provide for her family.

Mary and the Witch’s Flower

A strange flower grants a young girl magical powers, which leads to the adventure of a lifetime.

In This Corner of the World

As she combats her daily struggles In Hiroshima during World War II, an 18-year-old woman gets married and has to maintain the will to live. Heartwarming. 4.5/5

Bonus: 

These films have been out for several years, but if you haven’t yet seen them I am making a mention so that you can seek them out at your own discretion, because I find them all to be very good.

Ocean Waves

The arrival of a pretty transfer student from Tokyo sets in motion a change in the relationship between two best friends. This film was a made-for-TV attempt to sharpen the skills of the younger Ghibli animators. They may have bitten off a bit more than they could chew. The story is done with sensitivity and it is interesting, but something about the soul of the film seems to have suffered under the pressure to impress that those younger Ghibli workers must have been feeling. Still, I like it. 2.5/5

The Wind Rises

A lifelong love of flight inspires Japanese aviation engineer Jiro Horikoshi during the trials and chaos of his life in WWII Japan. The first time I watched The Wind Rises I was left a little unimpressed. It seemed strange and “too childish” for me. But I have since rewatched it with a more open heart and understood that this whimsy is intentional. That the atmosphere is a cry for the pure heart of the leading man, despite the reality of his time and place. It is truly a very deep and moving piece of work. I’d highly recommend watching in original Japanese. 5/5

Only Yesterday

Unmarried career woman Taeko Okajima takes her first extended trip outside her native Tokyo when she travels to rural Yamagata to visit her sister’s family during the annual safflower harvest. On the train, Taeko daydreams about her pre-adolescent self. As her vacation progresses, she has extended flashbacks about the frustrations and small pleasures of her childhood, and wonders if her stress-filled adult life is what the young Taeko would have wanted for herself. 

This one is only just freshly dubbed into English. Way back in the 90′s when Takahata actually made this film, his particular style of movie making, and the Ghibli brand in general hadn’t quite taken off in American cinema, so they chose not to dub this one. But with the explosive popularity of Ghibli since Spirited Away and the sudden lull in films produced since Miyazaki’s “retirement”, this film got it’s dub in 2016 in order to wrangle in some extra cash in the international movie market. 5/5

From Up On Poppy Hill

Umi Matsuzaki is a sixteen-year-old student attending Isogo High School living in Coquelicot Manor, a boarding house overlooking the Port of Yokohama in Japan. Her mother, Ryoko, is a medical professor studying abroad in the United States. Umi runs the house and looks after her younger siblings, Sora and Riku, and her grandmother, Hana. College student Sachiko Hirokouji, and doctor-in-training Miki Hokuto, also live there. Each morning, Umi raises a set of signal flags with the message “I pray for safe voyages”.

One day, a poem about the flags being raised, is published in the school newspaper. Shun Kazama, the poem’s author and a member of the journalism club, witnesses the flags from sea as he rides a tugboat to school. This starts a complicated but sweet romance between the two. The story is quiet and subtle, but this is intentional and well crafted. 5/5. Directed by Miyazaki’s son Gorō .

A Letter to Momo

Momo is recovering from her father’s death and her mother’s decision to move their family from Tokyo to a remote island when she discovers a message from her father that causes strange events to occur. 3/5. I enjoyed it, but it seemed like it was padding it’s run-time.

Giovanni’s Island

The story follows two brothers, Junpei and Kanta, who live on the island of Shikotan, shortly after World War II. On August 15, 1945, Soviet soldiers land on Shikotan and occupy the island. Junpei and Kanta, who live with their grandfather, a fisherman, and their father, the head of the firefighting force of the village, are forced to move to the stables while the Russian commander’s family, among them the commander’s daughter Tanya, move into the main house. The story follows the friendship that develops between the three children in the midst of the war.

4/5

Summer Wars

The film tells the story of Kenji Koiso, a timid eleventh-grade math genius who is taken to Ueda by twelfth-grade student Natsuki Shinohara to celebrate her great-grandmother’s 90th birthday. However, he is falsely implicated in the hacking of a virtual world by a sadistic artificial intelligence named Love Machine. Kenji must repair the damage done to it and find a way to stop the rogue computer program from causing any further damage.

Clever stroyline, likable characters and a respectable ending. 4.5/5

The Garden of Words

A boy named Takao trains to become a shoemaker and meets with a mysterious woman in the park when it rains. 3.5/5 for content 4.5/5 for heart.

Your Name.

now that most of us are at home, i thought this infographic could be useful to the ones who aren't that used to learning material on their own and aren’t sure where to start, or which order of steps to follow. happy studying! 💗

Tutorial: how to make a study schedule.

Make a reference sheet with separate lists for each subject. This reference sheet is used to orient your daily studying.

List the material you need to study for each subject. Be more specific than you would be on a study schedule and make sure you put down everything you need to go over.

On your schedule, highlight the exam dates and deadlines and put down any relevant information. (Get the template here)

Using your reference sheet, assign certain material to go through each day.

Scheduling tips

If you haven’t been working on study material throughout the semester; schedule days before your study leave to work on study sheets for revision, flash cards, summaries, whatever you use to study. 

Take a day to gather your study material before your study leave begins. Like the weekend classes end or so. This will save you a lot of time when you sit down to study every day.

Schedule your studying so that you start studying for the last final first, and the first final last. Make sure you start this early enough to give yourself time to revise for the subjects you need to.

If you have a day between each of your finals, take the night of the final off and revise for the next exam the day after. If not, take the couple of hours after your exam off then revise for the next one.

Schedule the harder/heavier material in a subject first, so that you work on that material when you have more energy.

If you’re taking subjects that you have difficulty with, or subjects with a heavy workload; schedule catch up days. However, don’t let that encourage you to slack off. Try to stick to your schedule and only rely on the catch up days if you really need to, and if you don’t; then it’s a day off!

Also, schedule days off… a day or if you can’t afford it, half a day. I can’t stress how important it is to take time for yourself, it’ll help you avoid burnout. 

Disclaimer: this is the way I’ve been making study schedules since I started college. By no means am I claiming it’s perfect or that everybody should follow it.

These are my own suggestions based on what I know about each type. Feel free to add more suggestions! Click here for Part Two.

ISTJ - The Duty Fulfiller

Moby Dick - Herman Melville  Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea - Jules Verne Frankenstein - Mary Shelley Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

ISTP - The Mechanic

Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell The call of Cthulhu - H.P. Lovecraft Brave New World - Aldous Huxley The Time Machine – H.G. Wells

ISFJ - The Nurturer

The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee The Mill on the Floss – George Eliot

ISFP - The Artist

The Three Muskateers - Alexandre Dumas Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf

INFJ - The Protector

Les Miserables - Victor Hugo The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien Life of Pi - Yann Martel Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

INFP - The Idealist

The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury Persuasion - Jane Austen Tess of the d’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

INTJ - The Scientist

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde - Robert Louis Stevenson The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle The Dunwich Horror - H.P. Lovecraft Catch-22 – Joseph Heller

INTP - The Thinker

If you don't know about what's been happening in India, I beg you please read up about it.

My country is burning, our 'democracy' is crumbling as I write this.

My friends were detained by the police at the peaceful protest, my family is in states that currently have no internet access, Mangalore has reported two people shot dead by the police.

Please, read up, speak out. Help us beat this, help us.

'sanghi' - a being who usually lacks any type of intelligence and calls those who doesn't agrees with him as an anti-nationalist. synonym - Namo sapien

it's so bad that even boomers were there

'tumhe kyu janna mera baap kaun hai?' - 'why do you wanna know who's my dad?'

'kashmir ko bharat banane chale the bharat ko hi kashmir bana dia' - you went to make kashmir india, instead you made india kashmir.

'main madar***d hun jo kamal ka batan dabaya' - i am a motherfucker for voting for your party

sleep is still important, always get 7-8 hours

dont drink caffeine past 2pm

dance around when you’ve been sitting for a while

p r i o r i t i z e y o u r t i m e

detox from technology and social media, it’ll still be there when it’s over

make sure you’re still eating 3 meals with small snacks

wear comfty clothes, trade your bra in for a big comfty sweatshirt

your grades do not define your intelligence

take small sections each day, dont cram at the last minute

take hot showers or steam your face

talk to a friend/family member about your stress, its not stupid

read it 10 times, say it 10 times, write it twice

small progress is still progress

listen to instrumental chill beats while you study

drink green tea

journal down your thoughts

take deep breaths when you’re feeling stressed

dont quit

remember to stay hydrated when you can’t caffinate

work out for 15 minutes or just walk around your campus 

listen to motivational audios

keep your chin up because you fucking got this

I was at the bus stop yesterday, listening to music and only superficially aware of my surroundings (it was barely 8 am, and both my mind and soul were still in bed).

Suddenly, I realize that a lady -- most probably in her seventies -- is trying to catch my attention. Apologizing for not noticing her signs right away, I take off my earphones and ask what I can do to help her. She gestures towards a Japanese woman standing right next to her. "I think she wants to know where to buy a new ticket", she goes on to explain, "but she doesn't know much Italian and I can't speak English. Do you speak English?"

It is making a spreadsheet of your debt and enforcing a morning routine and cooking yourself healthy meals and no longer just running from your problems and calling the distraction a solution.

It is often doing the ugliest thing that you have to do, like sweat through another workout or tell a toxic friend you don’t want to see them anymore or get a second job so you can have a savings account or figure out a way to accept yourself so that you’re not constantly exhausted from trying to be everything, all the time and then needing to take deliberate, mandated breaks from living to do basic things like drop some oil into a bath and read Marie Claire and turn your phone off for the day.

A world in which self-care has to be such a trendy topic is a world that is sick. Self-care should not be something we resort to because we are so absolutely exhausted that we need some reprieve from our own relentless internal pressure.

True self-care is not salt baths and chocolate cake, it is making the choice to build a life you don’t need to regularly escape from.

And that often takes doing the thing you least want to do.

It often means looking your failures and disappointments square in the eye and re-strategizing. It is not satiating your immediate desires. It is letting go. It is choosing new. It is disappointing some people. It is making sacrifices for others. It is living a way that other people won’t, so maybe you can live in a way that other people can’t.

It is letting yourself be normal. Regular. Unexceptional. It is sometimes having a dirty kitchen and deciding your ultimate goal in life isn’t going to be having abs and keeping up with your fake friends. It is deciding how much of your anxiety comes from not actualizing your latent potential, and how much comes from the way you were being trained to think before you even knew what was happening.

If you find yourself having to regularly indulge in consumer self-care, it’s because you are disconnected from actual self-care, which has very little to do with “treating yourself” and a whole lot do with parenting yourself and making choices for your long-term wellness.

It is no longer using your hectic and unreasonable life as justification for self-sabotage in the form of liquor and procrastination. It is learning how to stop trying to “fix yourself” and start trying to take care of yourself… and maybe finding that taking care lovingly attends to a lot of the problems you were trying to fix in the first place.

It means being the hero of your life, not the victim. It means rewiring what you have until your everyday life isn’t something you need therapy to recover from. It is no longer choosing a life that looks good over a life that feels good. It is giving the hell up on some goals so you can care about others. It is being honest even if that means you aren’t universally liked. It is meeting your own needs so you aren’t anxious and dependent on other people.

It is becoming the person you know you want and are meant to be. Someone who knows that salt baths and chocolate cake are ways to enjoy life – not escape from it.”