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Hey how have you been? I haven't logged in since the last time I responded to you x)

I ended up buying a whole bunch of manga in the past several months or so x) But I live in a condo and I have a small room so I'm probably going to have to make some room somehow.

My top recommendation for anybody getting into BL is https://myanimelist.net/manga/84255/Hidamari_ga_Kikoeru

Tell me how comfortable you are with sex scenes, so that I can give you more recs accordingly.

Shissou Nikki is pretty good, thanks for the recommendation :D Azuma's life obviously is very interesting, don't think I've read something like this yet =) It is also really interesting what the editors and the other people in the publishing industry have to deal with. An alcoholic mangaka, how do you even work with someone like that :D And all the people in the hospital, it is pretty interesting and impressive how they deal with all those difficult patients.

It is also kinda hopeful, reading about Azuma living as a hobo, surviving on a garbage food and all; makes you appreciate how different a life can be. I don't mean it in a way "see how worse off Azuma is than us, we have to appreciate what we have!"; rather somehow it is fascinating to see such a crazy alternative to a normal life. Instead of schedules, work overload, responsibilities, being a failure in the eyes of the people he knew, he got hunger, freezing over, having to hide, eating garbage, searching for cigarette butts, and being a failure in the eyes of people he didn't know. Such a huge difference, and neither of the two life styles are any good.

What did you like about this manga? =)

So then, do you have a BL or GL manga that stood out for you?

You're not into BL, right?

It does care, it is just that Tesuka's style of storytelling is very compact in some ways. Like, when he decides what he wants to focus on, he easily ignores everything else. In the volume I've read there was a story about a robot that was designed to defeat (which in this case meant - to kill) other strongest robots, and this story was pretty much all about feelings and emotions, with the bad guy as a main character more or less; well, and there were fights too, of course =)


I dunno. I guess I think that things are getting better because there is no shortage of factual (like, statistic-based and such) info with positive trends, usually due to economic or technological improvements. And it is really hard to find anything that could be marked as a bad trend that directly concerns humans and isn't readily disputed. But claims like "things get better" are insanely big and way-way too vague, so I don't have any hopes to justify them :D

I didn't say everyone would have to die. Everyone would suffer from hunger, that is all. Some may die, maybe even more than a half of the people would die; or maybe no one would =)

In theory then can, not in practice. Otherwise we would have wiped these viruses out already. The "the disease can be stopped if everyone does the right thing" statement contains an impossible condition, cause people won't do the right thing, that is not the human nature. If they would, we wouldn't need to discuss the Trees and their genocidal improvements plans =) We could just ask everyone to do the right thing, and crime would be gone. Since we can't, we are left (figuratively speaking, thankfully) with a choice to make ghettos for the infected people, or deal with the fact that new people will be infected, and we all just have to work towards fighting the disease and curing the infected.
And it is a practical problem too. When a particular disease is very infectious, and threatens to spread really fast, then we would actually isolate people who have it. But when it isn't, and the risks are low, then we would not. I don't want to say it reflects on some deep truths or values. But I like that we are willing to take very real risks rather than sending sick people to concentration camps. And the scenario with the Trees, it suggests the opposite; minimize risks and pay with completely innocent lives.

Wouldn't want that even if we could get it for free =) Maybe if I studied the details of the deal very carefully I could change that view, but on the surface it doesn't sound appealing at all. And I am talking about the clean deal, with no war, no Trees and victims; just boom, "people are incapable of wanting to commit a crime". You don't need to add negative things to the scales here, I am already against it =) I feel like in many ways it is the same as destroying humans and replacing them with robots, or maiming them all.
Interestingly (this is an aside from the trees and all that), I've recently listened to an argument about how breaking the law can be a good thing; the person I listened to gave as examples historical precedents with protesters who while breaking their contemporary (and sometimes modern too) laws pushed positive changes, like rights for disenfranchised social groups. That argument then transposed to a discussion about if it is actually good to have a perfect regulation system that doesn't even allow one to break laws. Obviously it would make things calmer and safer; but taking this tool out of the hands of the people who fight for positive change, wouldn't it put the society into a risk of stagnation? Funny enough, I think people who were writing Psycho Pass also asked that same question :D That anime deserves more credit ^^


^.^b
I am sure Uchiha Sasuke no Sharingan Den is the best one of those xD

I am reading it ^^/ You could have said it was about a mangaka loosing it and running away to live as a homeless person :D Would have been enough to make me interested ^.^ Maybe I'll write you a second message a bit later today when I finish it.


Gintama is pretty good. Didn't realize it was a historical anime of sorts =) The whole setup never made 100% sense to me, even after I've read your posts and talked about show with you here and there. Had to watch a few episodes to get it finally ^^'

Gintoki, Kagura, Katsura and Hijikata are pretty fun to watch, almost no matter what they do =) I never thought Katsura would be such a likable character. Too bad the anime is so long; there are so many characters I haven't seen yet, haven't seen a single Hijikata mayonnaise joke too T_T

Oho blaming MAL for your alleged response to my comment. Smart move ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

Lel if I had one wish, I'd wish for burning calories, the more food I eat ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) Or maybe the more I sleep, the more money I make ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

Crime novels, meaning light novels ya actual ones? Do you have any interest in crime shows? I think I recommended Person of Interest to you, but I could be wrong.

Why would you think that? Esp seeing how it was I who responded to you last, and not the other way round :/
My life's a little more hectic. Landed a couple work projects that are keeping me busy, and they might cut down the time I otherwise used to completely waste on MAL ;p You?
I see you didn't pick up Kuroshitsuji after 2015. Why's that?

Haha, I'm glad that you finally noticed the request

That is very true :D Kon would have had to do a lot of work to make it feel right. I dunno if he was all that interested in making villains though.

That is a huge manga, but just checking out a few chapters would be pretty good =) I know too little about his other works to say anything, maybe there are better series where you both get a good story and this funny art style. I can't imagine MW being as comedic as Astro Boy, but the synopsis does sound interesting. I would like to read it too some time. You can also look at Hinotori movies, they are adaptations of Tesuka's manga. I found them pretty interesting when I watched them.

:D Well, this is one of the things about Astro Boy manga, the emotions are tied together with the events. You don't get a lot of contemplations from the characters, even though the stories are often more than warrant some. And sometimes these kinds of crazy turns of events occur. Like, this mechanic actually deciding to use the boy's sister as a replacement part for his vehicle. You would think that this would be the climax of the story, that this decision would be contemplated by everyone, bringing out their personalities and whatnot. But nope, if was all off panel o.O The manga is just interested in telling this strange story, it doesn't really care about this boy and how he will live with this afterwards.

I see =) The whole thing with the trees wasn't that great I feel, so I don't think it would have made a huge difference for me if they changed it, made the "who is the bad guy?" question more ambiguous and such.
It is just his way of coping with reality though =) He acts as if everything is okay as long as it makes sense, but it is just a lie he believes in; or rather, its a shell he built for himself. It helps him change his focus from the painful reality wit loses to a less emotional abstract contemplation of whether or not what happened makes sense. And searching for this answer is easier than directly trying to come to terms with what happened. This shell is his strength, compared with most people, but it is also his weakness, compared with Yoshino who does try to look away from the reality.

There are two ways to think about this scenario. One of them is what you intended I think, which is to say that the Tree could make things unbelievably great and we just need to sacrifice a lot of people to make this happen. Of course I won't be supporting this :D Murder and human sacrifices are not an acceptable tool to bring in a better world. But that is morals-based view, it only sounds as good as the morals behind it. Another way of looking at it is to say that we will likely be able to achieve all this without the enormous casualties, creating orphans, producing an entire generation of murders and making our history to be built on a pile of corpses. If we are willing to put this much effort into making the world a better place, we may as well do it in better softer ways, same as we had been doing through our history up until now. This is an argument based on "we are already on the right track, and our current road doesn't require as much sacrifices" idea. It seems to be very reasonable.
Another argument yet would be to ask if the changes that this fight will bring will ever outweigh the losses. It would be pretty hard to prove that the number of prevented deaths and other kinds of damage would we greater than the amount that is going to be inflicted right away. And if the numbers are about similar, and even if we can hope to eventually prevent like twice as many deaths as the number of lives lost in this one war, it doesn't sound convincing at all that we should be starting it. If we were all about making life safer for people in statistical sense we would have banned/given up cars and bikes, they are just killing people non stop. No one does it though, instead we are slowly making them safer.

Here is a rhetorical argument to top off there previous two =) It is not really an argument, but I think it is more convincing then what I said above. This idea of making a war to rid the world of bad things, like murders and so on, it is the same as killing half of a village's population to save it from hunger in a bad year. It makes sense when you look at people as statistics data points, but it is completely revolting when you actually see them as people. Yes they all are going to suffer from hunger, but that is not a reason to strip some of them from their right to live.
Or here is an even simpler one. This war solution is essentially equivalent to fighting against an incurable disease by killing infected people. There are plenty of diseases in our day and age that are contagious, wide spread and horrible to the infected, like HIV. And plenty of people had spoken about isolating the infected. But that is not what we are doing, because there are better ways. Sure, maybe we could have kept the number of newly infected down if we threw away morals and put the fight against the virus above all else. But that is not what we want. We want to help people, not to fight the virus, although the two causes are linked. This is why we put so much effort into helping the infected, and I think most people who spent enough time thinking about it would be supporting this. It would be the same with the tree and the war in your scenario =)

I said there are two ways of thinking about it. So far I was only talking about one of them :P (hope you are not regretting giving me this chance to blab on >:P) But I think the reality is, the second way is the correct one, even though it doesn't provide much room for morality-related speculations. See, when you say "Murders, muggings, attacks, rapes, abuse, torture etc were also never supposed to exist" - what does this mean? That humans would not be physically able to commit these crimes? Or that humans who commit them would be instantly punished, so eventually fear would stop people from doing these things? Or is it that people would be mentally unable to do these things, like something would be rewired in their heads to prevent them from committing those crimes? What I think its, which ever is the answer, it will inevitably lead to us stopping being humans in the contemporary sense of the word. Like, being physically unable to commit crimes would require significant changes in how our bodies work. Most animals are capable of killing their kin, so I don't even know what kind of new body humans will have to be happy with that would prevent them from doing all that you've listed =)
The control with fear option is just as bad. There could be an argument that it is okay, but then by the same logic social structures such as shown in Psycho Pass or 1984 are fine too; and if we are fine with those, then I don't know why would we need the whole war thing. We could just wait till technology allows us to put complete control on every individual, and voila, we arrived in this same scenario. Except at least it is the humans that decided the rules and not an alien machine :P
The last option is the most interesting. Here you just change humans to be unable to do bad things. This is interesting because we have no clue how much of a human this new being would be. We don't know the connections between the various abilities that people have and value and the particular abilities that allow them to commit those crimes. Would it be good if a side effect of becoming unable to commit crimes is being unable to love, feel compassion, have ambitions, and aspirations, being sad or happy? IT is an interesting thing to speculate, but we don't have a lot of ground to stand on for these speculations. And same as with all other options, one day the tech will allow us to modify ourselves this same way without any help from a murderous tree, and no war would be needed then. But I am not sure how far the people would want to go with this kinds of modifications.

That essay went out of control a tad, sbt ^^/


Sure, I will =)

P.S.

I just noticed MAL finally started to show the list updates as it used to \^o^/ Finally, now I can stalk you again ^-^b I wonder if I missed any good manga in your updates while they were hidden =)

Well you can just watch the original movie. Its like less than 2 hours long.

Really? Thats pretty cool. I have the galaxy s8+. I like the size, it's big enough for me. I feel like phones are big enough that we don't really need tablets anymore. Many people don't seem to rock them as much either.

As far as anime goes? I haven't watched much lately although I'm still slowly going through yu yu hakusho again. I've mostly been reading manga more. I'm reading nausica of the valley of the wind and planetes at the moment.

I haven't kept up with any of the new anime stuff coming out but they all seem kind of meh. I haven't heard much of Saiki Kusuo no Psi-nan 2 though, what's it about?

So then were you keeping up with MAL updates via FB? Did you manage to watch/read stuff when MAL was down? I was so dependent on my lists that my entire otaku lifestyle came to a screeching halt when MAL went down :p
Yeah, I watched 1 ep of Fune wo and while it's decent, it's too slow for me to keep my interest in it alive.

I can differentiate between most of the southern languages but I am absolutely clueless when it comes to northern languages
Ahaha. That's us with Southie languages.

It's cool haha. I've been busy myself lately so I haven't been on this a lot.

Yeah I was originaly thinking of a tablet but I feel like they are somewhat going out of trend, although people still have it. But phones are getting so big and advanced that they seem to suffice.

It was pretty good as it explored the idea of the self and people's perception of themselves. I started watching ghost in the shell, stand alone complex and that's really good so far.

Have you watched anything new lately?

Haha. I thought you were being your usual self when responding late to my comments :p Which state requires you to speak Hindi? Must be a Northern one.

If you didn't mention that they are Rajasthani and Punjabi songs, I would have thought that they are both Hindi songs
Yeah, literally every Northie when it comes to South languages. Just one week ago I realized how remarkably different Telugu and Tamil are - with Tamil being more Southern in its pronunciations, than Telugu, which sounds closer to Sanskrit/Rajasthani.

Yeah I'm not sure about Fune wo Amu. It's good, but slow pacing bores me to death. And if I put it on hold for too long, I'll eventually drop it.

Well, I consider Bhojpuri a dialect of Hindi, but considering who you ask, many would argue it's a language
Oh, not many, but many major modern versions of North languages use Hindi as their base. See my careful wording? ;p
For eg, this is modern Rajasthani https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cKErCWrb44
This is modern Punjabi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qs2dZO6wcc
If they were their original versions, I doubt I'd understand even 1% of the lyrics.

So do you struggle in speaking or even understanding Hindi aurally?

The mermaid is pretty immoral for sure :D She just decided to entrust her child to the villagers and set a penalty for the case the contract is broken. You can argue that it is fine as long as both parties are okay with it, but the very nature of the task is such that generations will change and new people will inherit the responsibility they never agreed to. That doesn’t sound like a fair deal. That is the point though, I think. If the mermaid represents nature or the “natural order” of some sort, then it makes sense that it would bind you to a deal you never agreed to. This the kind of unfairness that nature brings. Like, being born to a Japanese village on the seashore means you have to deal with the possibility of typhoons and tsunamis, and you are not expected to agree to it. Same thing with the mermaid. As you said, she did act more like a force of nature than a character.
That said though, it doesn’t feel 100% satisfactory to just call the mermaid a force of nature and be done with it. Since she is conscious it would be interesting to know her side of the story too. Like, what is going on in her head that makes her feel justified in her actions? Is she just primitive and acts on instincts, or is there more to it? I know that is not what the story is about though, so it is not really fair to criticize it for leaving this out =)

Sorry sorry xD The manga is worth the look for sure, just for the art alone. If the adaptations preserved the weirdness of Tesuka’s stories they are probably good too. Just to give you a teaser, there was this one chapter long story there about a racer. His opponents burned his racing car just before the start and he was devastated. His sister tried to calm him down, but he pushed her aside or something, being consumed by grief. Problem was that the car had a computer that can’t be easily replaced, and there was no way to fix it, much less do it in time for the race.
So somehow it got down to the idea of asking Astro to donate his electronic brain for the racer’s car, just for the race. Astro was okay with it. The race started and soon the racer was ambushed by the bad guys, about to destroy his car again. Then Astro appears and saves the day. And the big reveal was that they didn’t actually needed to use his brain… because the racer’s sister was a robot whose purpose was to carry the replacement brain for the car. She told the mechanic about it, and her brain was inserted into the car instead of Astro’s. The racer won and now he had a fixed car with his beloved sister as its part. Sweet, isn’t it? :P It is wasn’t so childish it might have been disturbing I think :D I mean, they just turned a person into a thing, a tool. And the whole reason was to win a race, to appease the racer’s vanity. And his sister, what does it make her, having the purpose in life to be a replacement part for a vehicle. That is so wild yet so simple at the same time, it is very much Tesuka’s writing style. I like it a lot =)

Right =) Dragon Ball doesn’t try to be clever though, I feel like a lot of the interesting things that happen in the story are just accidents ^^ I am fine with that though.
Sounds like the way Gintoki would go :P

It was =) Thanks for the suggestion! It is pretty different compared to what I usually watch, I feel like it did me good to see it. I said that I would normally drop something like it very early on, and that was true. I think part of it was that I never experiences this kind of story, so I wasn’t able to understand its value before seeing much more of it.
By the ending do you mean the finial fight against the Tree of the Beginning? That was okay. I am kinda used to sitting through these unnecessary final fights =) Moribito’s was more trying, and it didn’t kill it for me either :P I feel like all the world-building plot in Tempest is just a decoration, including all the major action scenes. The real story was about the protagonists, their side kicks and their relations. And that was done really well all the way though, including the ending, so I have no complaints. If anything, all the interaction between Mahiro, Yoshino and Hakaze got better and better towards the end, there were dozens of great moments I liked. Hakaze breaking Yoshino’s composure, Mahiro and Yoshino reacting to the truth of Aika’s death, Yoshino telling Mahiro truth about his relations with Aika… and can go on and on :D It was fun to watch for sure.

Samon was pretty funny, I got to like him quite a bit =) He is way too dumb to be a leader of a secret organization, but so are most of the others ^^/

That is a pretty accurate picture of Yoshino =) I guess Mahiro is self-centered, habitually giving importance to his own emotions, while Yoshino is selfless, habitually giving value to what is important to the people around him. But you are right, both don’t have strong values that they would want to defend. Normally people like them shouldn’t appear on the stage, they should find a way to process their feelings without initiating grand action =) I guess the show had to give both Yoshino and Mahiro this extreme level of determination, just to make things happen. Not a criticism though. They are interesting enough characters. Although I feel like the particular ways they deal with situations is what makes them really interesting, not just the fact that they lack firm morals. Like Mahiro being able to accept anything that “makes sense”, and Yoshino incapable of holding a grudge. It is not like these traits are a natural consequence of their believes, it is more of a reflection of the way their emotions work. It is sort of who they are, which is kinda interesting.

It is a bit of a difficult question, because Tempest didn’t do such a great job with its world building =) If I was a random citizen with scarce knowledge of what is going on I don’t think I would be able to make a decision like that. Even characters like Samon didn’t have enough knowledge to make meaningful decisions I think. So it sort of makes no sense for me to say whom I would support, it is a matter of tossing a coin pretty much.
I can say this though. I don’t think the world is messed up and I don’t think it needs to be rebuilt. If there were a suggestion to rebuild it, then I would want to people to study this suggestion and find a way to meaningfully decide whether or not the idea is worth it. What I am saying is, all the events that have occurred in the anime, I would have preferred if they didn’t. There is no way to justify these tragedies as a whole.
However, if we are talking about minimizing damage, like choosing which tree to support to have as little victims as possible, then it is a good discussion, but I have no idea what the answer is :D I mean sure, if there was a way to use the Tree of the End to destroy the Tree of the Beginning before people started dying, then it should have been done, absolutely. There is literary nothing good that either of these two trees had to offer humanity, other than their own self-destruction.

Sure, of course =) Jinrui wa Suitai Shimashita looks pretty neat. Dunno how interesting it is, the synopsis is pretty weird xD I’ll have to wait and see I guess :P