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Hey dude! Sorry it’s taken me so long to respond again. Late Happy New Year and Merry Christmas as well, I suppose!! XD Hope you had as good of a holiday time as you could, all things considered. I didn’t really do much of anything for either. I didn’t even stay awake for midnight on New Year’s. If you want to read a bunch of my throughs on the new-year-change to make up for how long it took me to respond, I did write a lengthy blog post on the subject. =P

Man, I didn’t even realize that Mind Game was available on Crunchyroll! I’ll have to remember that whenever I might want to recommend it to someone.

Hmmm, armadillo and flying squirrel characters in for Sonic sound like a lot of fun! I might have to check that out.... I just checked and I do have Sonic Mania on PS4 and $5 isn’t bad for the DLC. I’ve been playing Slay the Spire again pretty obsessively lately trying to get the last few Trophies from the game. I FINALLY got Ascension Level 20 finish which I’ve been working on for a REALLY long time and then shortly after that I got the one for beating a boss in one turn. Now I just need the speed-run Trophy, beating the game in 20 minutes or less. I’ve gotten really close a few times, like less than a minute off, so I should be able to get it done soon, hopefully, or just get super frustrated in the process. =P But yeah, I’ll see about getting back into Sonic Mania after I’m done with that (or get sick of trying and need a break), then see if I’m into it enough to get the DLC. If I remember correctly, I think I got to a level that I really sucked at and couldn’t get past, so we’ll see how that works out.

Yeah, I kind of suck at keeping up with people in a lot of cases, like I only have enough room to maintain a certain number of connections or something?? It’d be nice to reach out to Matt and try to really catch up, but would I be able to actually maintain that?? I mean, I haven’t even been keeping up with Lamar for the last few years and sadly might not have much contact with you if it wasn’t for these comments back and forth.... Ugh, I’m lame. =P Actually, in the interest of maybe trying to keep in contact more, I’ll send you a private message after I’m done with this comment sending you my Discord ID so maybe we could have a new group chat with Lamar on there since I’ve deleted my Facebook, you know, if you guys use Discord. That’d be nice.

I’d like to see Tenet at some point. I really liked Inception, although I’d only seen it once so I should really watch it again sometime. I keep forgetting that Christopher Nolan did Memento! XD I should really watch that again, too. I’d only watched that once as well, many years ago (like around 2003??) but remember really liking that, too. And I think I MIGHT have briefly met SCOS once when I went with you to your college once??? And I do remember that Chewy went to the same school, and I kind of forget that he didn’t graduate with us, too. Pretty weird since in my mind he was one of the most “iconic” classmates from our class to me, mostly because of his super unique nickname and remembering him as such a generally cheerful dude. I hope he’s doing well these days.

I see that you still haven’t started Ghost Stories! You should get on that. XD I see that you did actually start Made in Abyss. Hope you’re enjoying it! I liked it quite a bit. Solid “9” for me, currently my #51.

I actually started watching a few anime from the current season now that I’m not strapping myself to any kind of “Challenge”. My “Finish Them” thing last year was particularly disruptive to me for trying to watch new anime because it made me feel guilty that I wasn’t using that time to finish old stuff. XD But yeah, right now I’m watching the second part of the second season of Re:Zero and I’m continuing to just love that series more and more the more I watch it. Seriously, depending on how this set of episodes ends, the series has the potential to actually crack my Top 10! I think I might need to re-watch a few things in my Top 10 to see if they “deserve” their current spots. Katanagatari and Gurren Lagann in particular really need to be re-watched since I’ve only watched those two once. I feel like everything else in my Top 10 I can re-evaluate properly without having to go back to them since I’ve re-watched all of them before, most of the 3+ times.

Actually, I very recently re-watched the Suzumiya Haruhi series because I watched the first six episodes (the entire “Melancholy” arc) with my friend David two visits ago and then re-watched the rest on my own. Man, I’m such a hopeless fanboy for that fucking series! I don’t think it can every be dethroned from its top spot on my list at this point. I got back to reading the new novel a bit the other day and just love how the story works, and between my re-watch of the series, “re-reading” it via the manga a few months back, and now the new novel, Tsuruya is really becoming one of my favorite characters in the series! I don’t know if she can pass Haruhi as my 3rd favorite (after Kyon and Nagato), but she is definitely solidly in 4th place for me at this point. She’s just so much fun!

Not too much else going on with me.... I’ve been keeping up with watching WandaVision after starting that with David and that’s been pretty fun. Work has been work. =P I’ll be getting a new work laptop today so that will be nice! I’ve been playing board games and watching some anime with one of my other friends most weekends, so that’s nice. Oh, I forgot to mention the other anime I’m watching this season. XD So I'm a Spider, So What? and Heaven's Design Team are the ones I’m watching with my friend and they’re both fun shows! Then I’m watching Horimiya, SK8 the Infinity, and Otherside Picnic on my own, though I’m behind on two of those. Hopefully I can catch up on them this weekend. We’ll see! Oh, and that’s cool that you and the girls are/were watching My Little Pony! What do you think of it? I need to get back to finishing that series at some point. XD

Anyway, I need to get ready for work and really want to finally get a response out to you!! Laters!! ^_^

Ah, I did mention Mind Game to you before, didn’t I. XD Yeah, I don’t remember things sometimes. And I felt the same way about the movie up until the restaurant scene. Like, “This is kind of just some weird pretentious artsy-fartsy bullshit. Where the heck are they going with this?” And I mean, it continued to largely be some pretentious artsy-fartsy bullshit that I wasn’t entirely sure where the fuck they were going with it all the way up to the end, but goddamn if it wasn’t an amazing fucking ride from the point where he took a bullet through the butthole! XD

Yeah, I’ve be interested in checking out the original Super Sentai series for a while, but just haven’t had the time. Also, if I was going to watch a tokugatsu series, I’d want to get back to the Kamen Rider stuff that I started years ago. What I’d watched of Kamen Rider Den-O was a lot of fun, but I got distracted by stuff after episode 16 (the only reason I know that was the last episode I watched is because I was re-naming my fansub files of the series as I watched them, getting rid of the [T-N] fansubber ID at the beginning and such so it just says “Kamen Rider Den-O 01.avi” instead of things like “[T-N]Kamen_Rider_Den-O_17[5C444001].avi”). I do highly recommend Den-O if I haven’t mentioned it to you before. It’s got a lot of amusing humor to it and seems to stand really well on its own; I don’t feel like it throws out a lot of references to other series in the franchise that I don’t understand. I do think it’d be really cool to watch the original Super Sentai that they used for Power Rangers Zeo (Chouriki Sentai Ohranger) since I really liked those costume designs. I’m not usually affected a lot by nostalgia, but I feel like watching that would be a pretty hardcore nostalgia trip for me.

Oh yeah! I remember you talking about SCOS back in the day! Don’t remember if I ever met him, like that one time that I visited your college with you. I think that happened, right? I’m not imagining it? XD But yeah, I’m not super into horror movies, but I do find them to be an interesting genre. I got into a YouTube channel called Scaredy Cats because I first found the guy’s main leftist political channel, Thought Slime. He talks about a lot of obscure horror stuff, plus a few more standard staples in the genre (his video about Freddy vs Jason is pretty damn amusing). I’d really like to check out a bunch of the stuff that he’s mentioned, but I just don’t really have the time for it when there is so much other stuff to watch (mostly anime). The only thing I’ve watch so far after seeing his video on it was The People Under the Stairs, which I randomly ended up watching with David and Ashley up in ABQ the last time that I was visiting them. That was a pretty cool and interesting movie! Highly recommend it if you haven’t already seen it.

But yeah, that’s cool that you were able to catch up with an old friend. I’d really like to reach out and try to connect with Matt again. He’s on Instagram and we “follow” each other, so I could easily message him on there. But I’m not really sure how to just start talking to him and shit. He seems to have had a LOT go on in his life since he’d left Ohio and I’ve had very little contact with him up to this point. Feels kind of intimidating, like will we actually be able to find common ground? I mean, you have kids, but I think Matt’s daughters are already approaching their teens (if they’re not already there) and I’ve been at least somewhat in touch with you throughout your growth in life. Matt’s life experience over the last 18 years or so just seems to vastly dwarf mine in comparison. I don’t know. Maybe I’ll get the balls to try initiating a conversation with him some day. =P

Oh, I don’t know if you’ve seen me on it, but I’ve actually randomly started another new game on PS4! It’s the video game version of the Pathfinder RPG tabletop game, Pathfinder: Kingmaker. It’s been a lot of fun so far! It really is like a digital version of the tabletop RPG, which I’ve been a huge fan of for over a decade at this point. I almost backed the Kickstarter for the game, but ended up backing out of it since I wasn’t sure if I’d have the time to really get into playing it since video games aren’t that big of a part of my hobby time these days. But in these COVID times, video games have been nice since I can’t really have people over to play board games. But yeah, it’s really cool because the Pathfinder video game has a turn-based-combat option which I guess was a later addition via an update on the original PC version but is part of the base PS4 release. I honestly couldn’t imagine playing the game in its original real-time version. The turn-based system really makes it feel like a damn-near-exact digital version of the tabletop game, except if you used a tape measure for movement instead of a square grid. Anyway, I’m happy with my purchase. ^_^

God, I don’t know when the hell I’m ever going to find the time to go back and watch all of the old Netflix Marvel shows; out of all of them I’ve still only watched the first two seasons of Daredevil. And I also need to get back to watching Lucifer. I was originally watching that with Dan, but I might just get back to watching that by myself at some point since it’s hard enough to get him to over to watch the anime we’ve been watching together. I also don’t know if I’ll ever get back to watching Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., but I definitely want to watch the new MCU shows that are coming to Disney+ as they’re released. I’ll be torrenting them though since Disney+ isn’t really worth it enough for me to subscribe until they hypothetically decide to get into the anime market and start snagging a significant number of high-profile exclusives for simulcast. I don’t know if that’s anywhere on their radar, though.

Happy belated birthday to Carter the Giant! ^_^ SOMEDAY I’ll be able to visit you guys and meet the kiddos. XD

Yeah, Shield Hero has been sitting on my priority anime watching list for a while, but with my Finish Them thing I haven’t been able to squeeze it in anywhere this year. Maybe I’ll finally watch it next year? I’ve actually only watched the first season of Isekai Quartet so far since that’s one of the With-Dan shows and there are a few anime we still need to finish off before we start new seasons of things. New seasons of Kaguya-sama, Fruits Basket, and Fire Force are also on the back-burner because of that.Ugh. If he doesn’t get his shit together soon I’m seriously going to consider just watching a bunch of that shit without him next year! XD

And man, I’m sure you’ll get a kick out of the dubbed Ghost Stories whenever you’re able to get a chance to watch that shit! The humor is SUCH a product of the 2000s!

Haha! I try not to get too deep into too many of the free-to-play games on Nutaku. The only ones that I’m seriously playing right now are Harem Heroes, Heavy Metal Babes, and Pussy Saga. Harem Heroes is easily my favorite game on the platform at this point. At its base level, it’s just a fun visual novel that slowly gives you new chapters. I mean, you’ll get frontloaded with a LOT of story content if you start playing the game now, but even after you catch up, it kind of feels like the visual novel equivalent of following a webcomic as it’s being released. But, on top of having the nice visual novel series, you have some really satisfying gaming aspects like the collection-nature of getting the different girls for your harem and stuff. It’s the only free-to-play game that I put real money into regularly right now because I think it’s worth supporting, and with all of the girls that I have in my harem, collecting the money they produce would be a total pain in the ass without the “Collect All” feature of the basic monthly card. But yeah, HIGHLY recommend it if you haven’t checked it out already. Heavy Metal Babes is a pretty fun game, but the story isn’t anywhere near as good or extensive as that of Harem Heroes. It’s kind of just something that’s in the background. But the training and upgrading of the different mecha pilot girls is pretty fun. Although, I’m getting a little discouraged on that front now after the recently expanded the maximum rank for the girls from 5 stars to 6 stars. With the way that ranking them up works in the game, it’s going to take a LOT of grinding to get all of my main 5-star girls up to 6-star rank. We’ll see if it will be enough for me to stop playing it. And then Pussy Saga is a game that I’d played a while ago on a different platform and recently randomly got back into a bit on Nutaku because there was a cross-promo to get some free Harem Heroes in-game currency if you tried Pussy Saga. It’s just a simple Candy Crush Saga clone (hence the name), but it is pretty fun and I find the art to be weirdly attractive in a “dirty” way. However, there are some major flaws with the game. The main thing is that there is a REALLY STUPID phone memory system which severely limits the number of images the number of images you can gain in the game, forcing you to spend the games premium currency (crystals) to get more image slots. You can get some crystals by playing the game without spending any real money, but it’s painfully slow. Like, I’ve been playing the game regularly for weeks, getting as many of the crystal-reward daily events that I can each day, saving up all of my crystals, and I only have 93. To by enough slots to cover my full image backlog would be 864 crystals!! And then there are certain aspects of the game that are locked behind having a certain number of images unlocked for the various girls, which is totally cock-blocking me in the game. I’m really tempted to buy a $50 crystal pack because it does come with a new girl a lot of the times and would provide 1400 crystals, which I would hope would be very close to as much as I’ll ever need to keep memory adequate. However, then comes the other issues (or fears) I have with the game. It kind of seems like the game is essentially “dead” and just mostly running on autopilot by the publisher, not getting any real updates anymore, and I’m worried that it will just legit fully die soon because the game is still running on Flash and support for Flash Player is ending at the end of the year and Windows is supposedly removing Flash from all browsers via a Windows update at that time. So, Pussy Saga might be impossible to play at that time so it’d be a pretty big fucking waste to spend $50 on a game that could be unplayable in 11 days. So, I’ll keep fiddling around with it and see if something is done for it to still run in 2021 before I dump that money into it. We’ll see!

But yeah, I’m mostly much more involved in the indie porn game scene, like the various things that are posted on websites like Adult Games Collector with developers asking for support on sites like Patreon and SubscribeStar. I’m actually supporting 9 different adult game developers on Patreon for some of my favorite games. I only throw them $1 (or $2 in the case of one of them) so my monthly bill is only $10, but every little bit counts for these kinds of things and I think those particular games are totally worth a little bit of money from me for all of the enjoyment that I get out of them. There are a few others that I really like that I might add to that list eventually.

And not too much else to report since my last comment to ya! Just pretty much been going through the motions with work and such since my staycation ended. I did have my first session of trying my hand at grooming Roscoe (one of my dogs) myself yesterday. That was interesting. His fur looks pretty well-butchered, but at least he doesn’t look like a shaggy 1970s carpet anymore! I’ll try to go over it with the clippers a few more times to try to make it more even whenever I’m feeling up to it. He’s essentially getting the COVID home-haircut treatment since I’ve been having trouble getting a proper grooming appointment for him and got desperate with how fucking shaggy he’s been getting. XD

And yeah.... Totally nothing else to report at the moment, really! Hope you have a good one and stay safe out there, dude! Talk to you later! ^_^

Hey dude! Sorry for the delay. I was meaning to catch up on my comment responses while I was on my two weeks of leave, but I got sidetracked by various things and only got one response done on the first Saturday that kicked off my time off. But, now I’m back to work and my laptop is having some program update issues, so I figured I’d try to respond to some stuff now! XD

So, first thing, about my leave.... Yeah, I ended up not going back to Ohio for Thanksgiving. I still took the leave because I had the use-or-lose that I needed to burn. I just stayed home and chilled by myself. I kept myself pretty busy. I ran through reading the last four volumes of the Haruhi manga in preparation for the new light novel volume and started reading the novel. I’ve only read the first two chapters so far which were standalone short stories which were already previously released but I never tracked down fan translations for them. The third new story is all-new and super long and I haven’t felt in the mood to start it yet with everything else I’ve been doing/trying to do. But yeah, I really liked the first two stories. They’d be great to see animated if they ever get around to adapting the series again. *wishful thinking*

One random thing that I put my energy into over my staycation was a random blog post for a “Dream” Casting for a Darkstalkers US Live-Action Movie which spawned from a conversation I had with my friend David the last time we hung out in person. I think you might potentially be amused by that.

And then something that took up a LOT of my time during my second week of leave was MY FIRST COMPLETE AMV!!! I think you might get a kick out of it since I done it for Asobi Asobase, which I know you’re also a big fan of that series. I mean, looks like you love that series even more than me since you scored it a “10” compared to my “9” and you have it on your favorites list! But yeah, check it out when you have a chance! “Like” it on YouTube if you can. ^_^ And now that I’m paying a $40 subscription for all of Adobe’s production programs (Premiere, Photoshop, etc.), I’ll be doing my best to get the most out of my money and make more AMVs and do other things.

I also got around to watching all of the old Guyver OVA as part of my “Finish Them” thing. I wasn’t super crazy into it, but it was a really cool blast-from-the-past and neat old-school viewing. Not sure if I’m interested enough to ever watch the newer Guyver TV series or trying to get into the manga (which I’m surprised is still kind of ongoing). I probably won’t, though. But I do REALLY want to re-watch the US live-action movie now! XD

Right now I’m watching Chihayafuru for my “Finish Them” this week and I’m really surprised at how much I’ve been getting into it! I ended up watching the first eight episodes before I started “working” today (because I woke up at 3am or something stupid). I’ll probably be at least half way through it by the end of the day. I just really enjoy the characters and the passion they have for Karuta. It has a very similar feel to what few sports anime I’ve watched. I don’t really care that much about the activity they’re participating in, but the passion that the characters have for it is infectious and I can’t help but get hype/emotional with it. Unless it hits some major missteps, this is definitely getting at least a “9” from me and going to be in my Top 100. I’ll just have to see how well it goes. And I’ll definitely be going back to the series next year after I don’t have my “Finish Them” stuff over my head anymore.

Speaking of finishing my shit, I’m in the home stretch for the year! After Chihayafuru, I’ll only have one series left on my original running “Watching” list! It’s a 50 episode series so it might be a little rough to finish this year, but hopefully finishing Chihayafuru quickly can let me get a head start on that this week. Plus as long as I at least get it to a place where I’m actually actively watching it instead of “watching” it, I think I can call that a win. I’m not sure if I can get my On-Holds down to 30 or less like I was really hoping for, but we’ll see and either way I think I’ve done pretty well.

I was also doing a little, little bit of non-porn video gaming, trying out Hollow Knight (but getting kind of frustrated after a while and stopping) and then getting back into my FFVII Remake hard mode playthrough (but also getting frustrated and stopping on that as well). =P And I saw that you can apparently “like” activity on Playstation now? I saw you liked a couple of my Trophies. That’s cool, I guess?? XD

Man, I still don’t think I’ll ever care enough to get Disney+. I mean, it seems pretty cool, but I’m so hyper-focused on anime that all I really need are my Crunchyroll, Funimation, and HIDIVE (and I guess Amazon Prime for what little they get). I watch so little other things that if there’s anything that I REALLY want to see from any other platforms I can just pirate it, if it’s not on a platform that I’m “borrowing” from someone else, like your Netflix and David’s Hulu. XD And while I’ve generally had no real interest in The Mandalorian (or really any Star Wars content beyond the core movies), I’m ALMOST thinking about checking it out after hearing about the recent episode that had Ahsoka join the cast, even though I’ve never watched the animated stuff that she originated from. I probably still won’t watch it unless there are some very particular circumstances to drive me to do it. But, I am ever so slightly more interested in watching it. Though if I were to watch it, I would just pirate the episodes instead of subscribing to Disney+. =P

I should get back into xxxHolic eventually. I used to be super into CLAMP stuff and was collecting all of their manga at one point, but dropped off on it and sold off nearly all of their stuff from my collection. xxxHolic was pretty cool, though, from what I remember. Based on my list, I apparently get 5 volumes into the manga (only watched the first episode of the anime), and apparently that series is technically still going too since it had a sequel series done. Ahhh, just so much stuff to watch/read!

Haha! Yeah, I actually had an Instagram account before I got my smartphone, but posting on it was a major pain in the ass before because I had to use my crappy basic Android tablet and had to transfer stuff from my computer over to that so I could post anything actually decent since the camera is shit and I don’t really have anything worth posting saved to my tablet. =P Having the Smartphone has been alright, but it does seem like it’s running slower than it should and my boss actually said she tried to call me twice today and it went straight to voicemail so she sent me a text to call her. If I keep having issues I might take it to a Verizon store to have it looked at sometime soon. And nah, like I said, I’m actually planning to delete my Facebook; I’ve pretty set a kill date for the end of the year. I haven’t even put the Facebook app on my Smartphone. So getting back on that group chat won’t really do any good. XD I’ve been telling people to either use Discord or Instagram with me if they want to send me chat shit beyond what can go in a text, although I guess I can get more complicated text now, so that would work, too. =P

Yeah, I’ve heard a lot of good things about Genshin Impact. It does seem pretty neat, but I don’t think I’ll get into it. For the moe bullshit I’ll just stick to watching anime and playing porn games. ^_^

Oh, dude! I just looked at your profile getting ready to post this comment and I saw that you recently watched Mind Game and that you gave it a “10”! Glad you got to see it and liked it! I love that movie, although it is JUST on the cusp for me, just barely getting a “9”. But man, such a great movie. I watched it when I was doing my “movie-per-day” thing last year and parts of it kind of blew my mind and then I re-watched it was David a while back and it was really getting ready to creep up higher for me. That sequence when they were escaping the mouth of the whale was one of the most hype things I’ve ever seen!

And I think that will be it for me for now! Just not that much going on with my life and such with lockdowns and shit. Talk to you later!

Haha! Yeah, typing long ass comments in MAL first is a lot safer, especially if you’re not able to write it all at once like is usually the case for me. XD

I’ve gotten to the final event in Fall Guys a few times, too, but also never won. I’d get really excited whenever I’d get the one with the disappearing hexes where you fall down the various levels and such because I feel like I’m pretty good at that and got really close the first time I was on that one, but every time since some fucker usually fucks me up somehow, running around like a dipshit or something. XD

I saw that you’ve been playing Marvel’s Avengers. I’ve heard some pretty mixed reviews about it, but it does seem like it can be a fun game overall as long as you can look past some of its flaws. Hopefully the game’s multiplayer doesn’t die or anything; seems like that can be a big issue with those kinds of games these days. I’m kind of excited for the next generation of consoles coming up, but I probably won’t pick up a PS5 for about two years after launch or so. The main thing that’s coming out for that which I’m really excited for is Final Fantasy XVI and since that hasn’t even shown an expected year when it will be releasing (as far as I’ve seen), I’m sure it won’t be out for at least two years anyway. But yeah, looks like a pretty damn cool game. Reminds me of what you might get if you mix FFIV and Final Fantasy Tactics as far as the theme/tone/story goes and then put it in a modern action RPG package similar to FFXV and FFVII Remake. Hopefully it turns out as good as I’m hoping!

Hmmm, that Brawlhalla game looks kind of interesting. I’m not super into fighting games these days, but I might check it out if I have a chance/remember it sometime since it’s free to play.

I’m still mostly doing good with the finishing stuff thing, though I’m not sure what I’m going to try to get watched this week. I’m pretty “meh” on the remaining stuff in the “Watching” section of my challenge list.... Actually, I just ended up randomly picking Guilty Crown to continue watching today. Started it back up from the beginning since I didn’t really remember anything from when I watched the first episode years ago and got through the first four episodes. It’s not super captivating for me so far, but it’s doing enough to keep me interested. It has a good amount of interesting and stylish sci-fi-bullshit so that’s cool. And the relationship dynamic between the main pair is kind of nice and there are some other interesting characters. So yeah, hopefully it won’t be too hard for me to keep watching and finish it by the end of the week.

It wasn’t on my official list since it was one of the few “new” things that I started this year, but I finished off the last five episodes of Re:Zero Season 2 Part 1 on Sunday and holy shit was that intense! You should get on watching that, man. I’d say a re-watch of Season 1 with the director’s cut is worth it because I think it’s a very re-watchable series, but the second season stuff is really good. It does kind of suck because they split this season and it stops in a bit of a weird spot, but it’s scheduled to start back up in January, so not too much of a long wait to get started back up again. So yeah, not too much of a hurry to get to the first half of the second season RIGHT NOW.... Man though, I’m just loving this series more and more the more I watch it. After this set of episodes, it got a big bump on my working Top 100 Anime/Manga Series List, going from my #38 to my #18! I’ve also put Subaru in my favorite characters list now. Man, he can be a bit of a pathetic piece of shit sometimes, but he also has to deal with so much shit and grows so much throughout the series. I’m not sure if I’ve ever felt this much sympathy and empathy for a fictional character before. But yeah, they also introduce all seven of the witches in this set of episodes; they are all such fun characters! You know, I’ve really liked Rem and Emilia and a few of the other female characters in the series, but I haven’t had any in the series that I’ve really fallen in love with, like full “waifu status”, until now. Echidna, the Witch of Greed, is kind of amazing. I mean, she’s a witch so she ends up being kind of a fucked up bitch, too. But I really like her. Easily my favorite female character in the series now.

Man, I had dropped Casshern Sins YEARS ago. I remember being so damn bored by the first episode that I didn’t even include it on my Finish Them list as a possible revival. You should let me know if you think it might be at all worth me picking back up. =P

I’m still scared of starting Gintama since it’s so fucking long. XD Shield Hero is definitely one that I need to remember to go back and watch, though. Isekai Quartet was fun, but I’ve only watched the first season so far. I’ve never watched Tanya or Overlord, but don’t really plan on watching those and I felt like I didn’t lose too much in Isekai Quartet without seeing those, especially since I had Dan to fill me in on a few of the details about those characters.

I see that you’ve started a bit of the second season of Railgun. I will say that it does go a little deeper into the Misaka clone stuff and basically retells the Accelerator fight from the first season of Index, so you might like it more than the first season or less because it does a significant amount of re-hash.

Haha! If you show the girls Haruhi, you’ll have to let me know how that goes. XD

I ended up actually writing a Review of the Monogatari Series: First Season Audiobooks that have been released so far, so check that out if you have a chance (and hit it as “Helpful” if you can). ^_^ And yeah, you should really get back on watching the Monogatari Series anime stuff! Great series.

Hahaha! That’s funny about that FighterZ saying you didn’t deserve your rank. XD Some people are just dumb salty bitches. But I totally feel you on subconsciously giving people a handicap so they don’t get butt-hurt and not want to play anymore. I kind of do that in board games sometimes because I’m not really that competitive of a person and just want to have fun with it, so I don’t really care all that much about winning. But then sometimes I get a little too caught up in the game and just feel the urge to do the best I can and just completely demolish who I’m playing against. XD Luckily my main gaming buddy David doesn’t mind too much when I do that, and there are a few games that he’s been able to beat the ever-living shit out of me in, too. That’s the nice thing about cooperative board games; that you are all in it together so you don’t have to worry about holding back. Although in that case sometimes I have to fight the urge to “alpha game” and tell people what they should do on their turn. I think I used to be really bad about that, but I’ve gotten better. Mainly because I don’t care that much about winning and just want to have fun.

Hahaha! I don’t know how much of the old ThunderCats I’d watched as a kid, but I definitely don’t remember that stuff! XD The last time I was over David’s house we did randomly put on the first episode of the 2011 reboot of the series, though. That was kind of interesting. I’m actually taking all next week off from work and spending most of that time up in Albuquerque with David, so that should be fun. Play a lot of board games and watch a bunch of stuff and just hang out and shit. Hopefully it will be a good break.

And yeah, things are going mostly well now with the end of the fiscal year behind us. We’re back to teleworking most of the week, usually only going into work on Wednesdays for training and meetings and such. The telework stuff is still a little weird at times, blurring the line between home and work and such. I’ve mostly gotten the hang of it, though.

Oh, and since the end of the year is coming up and since I had to cancel my leave to go to Sydney’s graduation and stuff because of COVID, I still have a bunch of annual leave that I need to use before I lose it. In addition to the week I’m taking off next week, I’m also taking off the weeks before and after Thanksgiving to go back to Ohio, assuming nothing too crazy happens between now and then. My mom and them don’t have anything particular planned and some of the extended family isn’t even going to be in town during that time, but it should still be nice to see peeps and such. It will be funny that I’ll probably end up spending a decent amount of time by myself reading the new Haruhi novel while I’m there, though. =P

In other news, I recently got my first ever smartphone!! XD It’s kind of weird since I didn’t really have any desire to get one, but these days people are just assumed to have one and some things have begun to be inconvenient without one. Like, there’s a group chat/text thing that I’m in for work now that we’re teleworking, but on my old flip phone it all came through as individual text instead of being in chat-room form and would take a few seconds for each text to come through because they came through as media messages or whatever. So yeah, that’s a lot easier now that I have a smartphone. And Instagram is a lot more useful now, which I mainly just got to have some extra shit linked to one of my online dating profile things. It’s also just a better alternative to Facebook since I’m really wanting to just delete that shit soon. I mean, Facebook technically owns Instagram, but it seems a lot less intrusive and shit.

Anyway, that’s about all that’s going on with me! .... Shit, I was just thinking that I didn’t do TOO bad with my response time this time around, but it did still take me nearly a month to respond. XD Anyway, talk to you later and hope you’re doing well! ^_^

Hey dude! Sorry for going dark on you. I actually saw that you messaged me on PlayStation a few days after you sent it. For some reason I tend to not see notifications on there very often and then the counter that tells me I have unread things or whatnot is barely noticeable, at least with the theme I use on my PS4. But yeah, I did get into Fall Guys for a bit there, but have fallen off on it lately. I’ve gotten back into playing Slay the Spire instead, trying to get some more of the Trophies on there and such. It’s just an easier game for me to just pick up and enjoy while. Fall Guys is amusing though.

But yeah, I’ve been pretty out of it lately. Like I mentioned in my last comment, we went back to teleworking full-time and then on top of that we’ve been gearing up for our fiscal year closeout, with our fiscal year ending 30 September and needing to make sure all of our budget is spent/balanced and such. So yeah, tomorrow’s the big day! My routine has just been all out of whack. To keep up with my comments back to the MAL peeps, I think I just need to make sure that the Word document that I use to type my MAL comments into before I copy-paste them in to send to people on here is always up so that I just work on writing back whenever I get a little bored. It’s better than just feeling blah and getting next to nothing done when I’m getting completely drained from work and life. These past couple weeks in particular have been pretty intense at work, usually putting in at least an hour or two of overtime in every day and having absolutely no downtime. And we started working in the office full time again starting last Wednesday so we can focus and work together more easily for these last few days of closeout and the first few days of the new fiscal year, especially so we can be close to our Contracting counterparts across the hall in our building. Even went in for a half-day Saturday to get some stuff done. We’ll most likely be working literally all night tomorrow, working up to midnight. It’s been rough, but at least I’ll have some pretty decent overtime pay in my next two paychecks! We might be going back to mainly telework after this week is over since things haven’t really gotten all that much better with COVID. We actually had a bit of a COVID scare today. One of the guys who pops into our office ALL THE TIME send it email today saying that he found out that he recently came in contact with a doctor who tested positive for COVID so he went back to working from home. He has at least been wearing a mask whenever he’s been in our office, so hopefully he didn’t get anyone sick, if he happened to be carrying.

Aside from work stuff, I have been able to get some semi-regular friend time in. I’ve been able to go to Albuquerque to visit David and Ashley and/or they come here to visit and hang out at least once a month, so that’s been nice. I especially like going up there because, again, it gives me the perfect excuse to listen to the Monogatari audiobooks. I listened to the second part of Bakemonogatari over my last two drives up there and back and I enjoyed Suruga Monkey and Nadeko Snake a lot more than I was expecting! Listening to the audiobooks up to this point has caused me to officially bump up the Monogatari Series on my Top 100 rankings two spots from #5 to #3!! I’ve actually had a little movement in my Top 10!!! XD I can’t wait to listen to “Part 3” of Bakemonogatari since it will have Araragi and Senjougahara’s date. Senjougahara has been absolutely wonderful in the audiobooks and I can’t wait for the date since that had some of her best dialog in the anime. HYPE!!! I’ll actually be driving up to visit David and Ashley this weekend to celebrate their birthdays! Based on my physical copies of the books, Part 3 is the shortest of the three Bakemonogatari books, so I’ll probably be able to listen to damn near the whole thing during my drives there and back; might have to finish listening to the last little bit after I get back home. But yeah, hanging out with them this weekend should be a nice time to decompress afte closeout. We’ve also been talking about me taking leave and going up there for an entire week sometime this month as well; maybe the last week of the month. But yeah, still super sad that there don’t seem to be any current plans to do audiobooks for the rest of Monogatari First Season; Nisemonogatari Parts 1 and 2 and Nekomonogatari (Black). Sucks that I’ll either have to read those books manually or skip ahead to the Nekomonogatari (White) audiobook.

But speaking of reading things manually, have you heard that the first new Haruhi novel in over 9 years is finally getting release!?! I’m super hype! Been waiting SO long for this! You know, 9 fucking years! XD It’s coming out in late November and Yen Press is doing a simultaneous English release of the book in digital format. I know what I’ll be doing Thanksgiving weekend!! ^_^ Maybe the author will actually get back to releasing books more regularly and work towards finishing the series? Maybe more books might even make the prospect of producing more anime for the series worthwhile?! That’d be awesome, although it’d also be sad considering how a number of the people who worked on the previous anime releases died in the KyoAni fire. And if they even THINK about handing a core Haruhi anime adaptation to anyone other than KyoAni.... That’d just be in super bad taste. I mean, the sequel for the Kobayashi’s Drago Maid anime has been confirmed to be getting done by KyoAni now despite the director of the first season dying from the fire. Anyway, we’ll see. For now I’m just happy to be able to read more of the novels. I’ve finally gotten back to reading the manga version now that I’m working in person again and have my structured lunch breaks to read during (I got almost ZERO manga reading done while I was on full-teleworking). Maybe I’ll finally finish off the manga before the new novel comes out. That will be a nice refresher of the story so far (especially when it comes to the stuff that was never adapted to anime) since it’s literally been about 9 years since I read volume 10-11 of the series (those two books were a 2-parter which were released at the same time).

Hahaha! That’s kind of funny (and cute) that Tommi uses your going on-and-on about anime to keep you sharp during long drives! XD I actually had a decent anime/manga conversation about anime with a girl that I work with today. I have a Haruhi facemask that I wear which was converted from an old T-shirt of mine. She didn’t really recognize it, so I told her what it was from and mentioned being hype about the new book. Ended up talking about other series and talked a decent amount about Soul Eater and how the manga is such a better story than the anime, especially in how it develops the characters more, like how Black Star becomes a total fucking badass instead of just being an annoying Naruto parody. XD It was nice just BS’ing about anime to someone, especially in these times of isolation and only seeing David once or twice a month and Dan not really hanging out all that often either. The long 18-hour-or-so work day tomorrow can also be kind of nice in that regard. I’m going to be taking some board games with me just in case we have some downtime of just waiting to be released without any real work to do. One of my coworkers, Carl, absolutely loves Star Realms which is one of my favorite deck-building games, so that will be a major one that I’ll be taking with me.

I’ve actually continued to be super neglectful of new anime this year. I’m somewhat interested in The God of High School, but I’m still trying to focus as much as possible on finishing things. And with things being so busy/draining lately, most of my Finish Them weeks over the last two months have been some major cop-outs, like only watching six or less episodes worth of stuff. A lot of finishing of hentai OVAs and such. XD I just gave the seasonal page for Fall 2020 a quick look and there isn’t much that immediately interests me there other than maybe the Higurashi reboot, but even then I’m not all that sure how I feel about that. I love the old anime so much that I’m not sure if a new version can really live up to that. Like, what’s the point if it’s not at least as good? Am probably just setting myself up for disappointment if I watch it. I’m definitely not a huge fan of the art style based on the trailers I’ve seen. But who knows; maybe it could be good?? And yeah, it seems like adapting Korean comics to anime is becoming a pretty regular thing now. Fall 2020 at least has Noblesse. The synopsis for that doesn’t interest me at all, though. The God of High School at least seems like a lot of fun just for its crazy fight animation and such. But I’m still finding it to be pretty funny how some people have been convinced that Korean and Chinese animation would be surpassing Japanese anime SOON!!! Like, I was having this whole big long back and forth conversation with a guy on here back in 2018 and he was totally convinced of Korea’s superiority over Japan when it comes to comics. It was kind of frustrating at times because he just argued in circles, but it was also kind of amusing. I feel like he probably isn’t a native English speaker. But yeah, looking back on what we talked about, the last thing I said in our main be back-and-forth was “See you in 2020” because dude was totally convinced that anime would just be DONE by then. I wonder if I should try starting a conversation with him again??? XD

And I think that will be it for me. It’s getting a bit late and I should really start winding down for bed since I have a really long work day ahead of me tomorrow. I don’t have too much else to report at the moment anyway. Not all that much going on in my life these days! Wheeee!!! XD Anyway, hopefully I’ll be able to keep in touch a little better from now on. I really suck at this shit sometimes. Sorry about that! Talk to you later! ^_^”

So yeah, with COVID stuff getting worse and such, we ended up going back to full-telework in our office starting this week as our default. Yay.... Actually, not all that sarcastic “yay” there. Like I said in my last comment, I have a better home-work set-up now, so it isn’t all that bad and is kind of nice in some ways. Just being able to have most of my regular YouTube junk playing in the background while I work is really cool because it theoretically frees up time after work to watch anime and other things that I’d want to devote more focus to while watching. I mean, I haven’t watched a single piece of anime after work so far this week, so yeah.... XD

That’s cool that you were able to have a fun small gathering. Despite the COVID I also had a little in-person friend time. Went to stay at David and Ashley’s place up in Albuquerque for the long 4th of July weekend just to hang out. We played some board games. Watched some stuff. I randomly brought my Game Cube with me and we played some “old school” video games. It was really nice. I’m going to try to go up there for a visit at least once a month. Even the 3.5 hour drive each way is kind of nice because it gives me a good excuse to listen to audiobooks. Between the two drives for 4th of July, I listened to nearly all of the first part of the original Bakemonogatari novel on audiobook (finishing the last bit of it after I got home). It was really cool to listen to. I don’t remember if I told you about the Monogatari Series on audiobook before, but I’d previously listened to the Kizumonogatari audiobook. The way they do these is really cool. Since the Monogatari Series is very dialog-heavy, they have a few different readers (usually three or four) to play the different male and female characters, making it play more like an audio drama compared to the usual audiobook. This audiobook included Hitagi Crab and Mayoi Snail so it was really nice getting my fill of Senjougahara goodness. I’m really looking forward to listening to Part 3 which is entirely made up of Tsubasa Cat, which is the arc that Senjougahara hijacks from Hanekawa in order to go on a date with Araragi (episode 12 of the anime, one of my favorite single anime episodes of all time). I guess I’ll need to listen to Part 2 first though (Suruga Monkey and Nadeko Snake). It’s weird how they’ve been releasing the audiobooks, though. They released Kizumonogatari first, which isn’t too weird since it was the first book they released in English, at the recommendation of the original author. But then they released Nekomonogatari (White) on audiobook, the first book of “Second Season”. Then they went back and finally did the three parts of Bakemonogatari. Hopefully they’ll do Nisemonogatari and Nekomonogatari (Black) audiobooks soon to finish off “First Season”. That’d be nice.

Yeah, I liked Kill la Kill a lot! I ended up giving it a “9” and it’s currently at #51 on my working Top 100 Anime/Manga Series List, prompting me to order the Blu-ray box set soon after I finished watching it on Crunchyroll. I really felt like it could have gotten a full-10 and ranked significantly higher, but there were a few nagging issues for me while I watched it. Mainly I felt like the plot structure and message behind the story was a bit lacking, especially compared to Gurren Lagann and Little Witch Academia. Stuff by Trigger (and pre-Trigger Gainax) usually has some kind of metaphorical theme behind it. Kill la Kill does have it to an extent, but it felt much more messy compared to others and a lot of it felt like the same message that was behind Gurren Lagann (evolving, advancing, and breaking from restrictions), just using a different genre and adding on extra stuff (like general no-conformity and getting away from the whole “cloths make the man” mentality) which kind of just muddied the waters. I felt that Darling in the FranXX even did a better job of expressing its themes and metaphors, although the plot itself totally went to shit after episode 15.... But again, I still REALLY liked Kill la Kill overall and look forward to re-watching it when I have a good chance. Maybe it will “click” with me a little better upon re-watch and it can rank up? We’ll see!

I finally finished watching Railgun S today. It was solid enough, but I think that will still be the final piece of the Index/Railgun franchise that I ever consume unless there are special circumstances that encourage me to watch more from it (like a new friend or girlfriend or somebody who is really interested in checking it out and really ends up liking it or something). Definitely not a bad franchise, but it just got too fucking messy for me to continue following it. XD

Yeah, I’ve heard that the Erased live-action is pretty good. I’ve only consumed the anime so far, but I really liked that. Some people really didn’t like how the anime ended, though I didn’t mind it too much. Apparently they altered/condensed some stuff from the original manga. I’d be interested in reading the manga at some point and maybe watch the drama afterwards.

Haha! Nice! Those beats are a total blast from the past! ^_^ I actually have some of your stuff on my computer. Weirdly, I have five albums, numbered 37 through 41 for some reason. And looks like a few tracks are missing from some of them? Weird. =P I’ll have to check to see if I have more saved on a different hard drive or burnt to data discs or something.

But yeah, not much else going on with me other than teleworking, hanging out with people when I can, and watching anime and such. Talk to you later, dude!

I got pretty into the PS3 Ratchet & Clank Collection a few years ago, but after I got close to 100% on the first game I got distracted. =P It’s a pretty fun game, though. I should pick it back up again at some point.

Ah, yeah, when I mentioned that pizzagate is pretty much complete bullshit, I didn’t mean that to imply in any way that similar fucked up shit doesn’t actually happen. Sex trafficking/abuse (under-aged and otherwise) is definitely a very real and serious issue. I haven’t watched the Jeffrey Epstein documentary myself, mostly because I haven’t been in the mood to get depressed/angry from watching it. I did watch a review of it from the Double Toasted guys, though. They’re biggest positive for it was when it focused on giving a voice to the victims, something that we didn’t really get much of from the general news coverage of the scandal. But their biggest negative was that they felt it was too drawn out and padded with dramatization/stock footage kind of stuff, that it could have easily been a single 2 hour documentary instead of four episodes, each an hour long. I think that something that might prevent me from ever sitting down and watching it. It just feels like watching it would be a bit of an exhausting experience. It’d be like if Tiger King would have focused almost entirely on the animal cruelty of the situation instead of being 90% stupid/crazy white trash drama.

Hahaha! That’d be cool to see Carter and Charlie do a fusion dance when they’re closer to the same size. ^_^

Yeah, I can imagine the COVID stuff being a bit weird where you live, being in and around so many smaller states and state-like-entities and such. That’s what happens when this is almost entirely left up to the individual states without good leadership at the top.... Had my first day of off-and-on telework yesterday and it was kind of nice now that I have a better work set-up at home. It’s also nice to be able to be able to have my YouTube subscriptions videos going on in the background as I work so I can focus more on watching anime after I clock out.

Speaking of anime, I finished Ouran High School Host Club as my finisher for last week, and I liked it about as much as I liked the original manga, so I’m planning to donate my DVDs of the anime along with my manga volumes whenever our library opens back up. And I watched A Whisker Away on Saturday as planned and that was a fun cute little movie. It got a solid “8” from me, currently ranking as my #36 favorite standalone anime movie. And right now I’m watching Kill_la_Kill for this week’s finisher and I’m liking it quite a bit! It mostly felt like empty Trigger special at first, but as it went on I got more into it. I still have 9 episodes to watch so it has a chance to either go up or down in my rankings, but if I were to judge it right now, I’d give it a pretty solid “9” and it’d land at maybe #65 on my Top 100 anime/manga series list. But we’ll see if it finishes strong for me (like Gurren Lagann) or if it crashes and burns a bit (like Darling in the FranXX). But yeah, I’ve been trying to do my weekly finishing a bit ahead of schedule this week since I’ll be out of town for the weekend. Luckily Kill la Kill has been a pretty easy watch for me, making me look forward to watching every episode.

Yeah, I’ve been kind of interested in checking out Tower of God with all of the hype it has gotten, both for the anime and the original comics (Webtoon/“manhwa”). I still haven’t gotten all that interested in Korean comics, though, so I haven’t been super interested in it. Although just the concept of a fully-Korean comic getting a fully-Japanese anime is a pretty interesting thing on its own. I keep hearing how Korean and Chinese animation is going to threaten the market share of Japanese anime for years now, but I still haven’t seen any real evidence of that “threat”. I don’t know if I ever showed you this or mentioned it, but I had a pretty extensive back-and-forth in this blog post comment section. XD But yeah, looks like the Tower of God comics are still going and is probably free to read on WEBTOON if you’re interested in reading it on its native legit platform.

And oh man, Index III.... Sorry dude, but that was like one of my biggest anime disappointments EVER! XD Soooo badly handled (in my opinion). I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on it whenever you finish it, though!

Oh! Happy belated birthday to Charlie! Hope you guys were able to have a good time and such!

And I think it’s it for me this time around. Not much new going on since my last comment and it’s about time for me to leave work! Have a good one and talk to you later!

Haha! Yeah, that sucks when you lose a reply. Glad you were able to recover from your loss, though! XD

And yeah, that's still pretty funny about your girls liking anime music more than the anime itself.

I did watch a bit of one of your Magicka 2 videos with Carter. It was pretty funny watching her mostly just run around not doing anything but reviving you when you died. I think I got distracted and stopped watching soon after the first time both of you died. But yeah, it looks like a pretty fun little game. I might have to check to see if I have it in my library or not, if it might have been a free Playstation Plus game at some point. I think I might have it and might have just never tried it because there's a "2" in it and I was kind of like, shouldn't I maybe try the first one first?? =P And yeah, I remember that zombie game you're talking about. I had to Google "top down zombie shooter" to find the name of it: Dead Nation. That game was pretty fun. I remember getting really into it and pretty close to getting 100% trophies but then getting distracted. =P

Yeah, Space Force seemed to have gotten generally "meh" reviews, including a YouTube channel that I'd gotten into somewhat recently called Double Toasted. But one of the guys on there made a point that the first seasons of The Office and Parks and Rec (the two shows that the creator of Space Force is best known for) didn't have great first seasons either. So yeah, maybe the series will get better as it goes on if they continue to make it. Have you had a chance to finish the first season yet?

Oh man. Try to be careful with that YouTube conspiracy theory stuff. I'd never heard of "frazzledrip", but "Pizzagate" has been pretty thoroughly debunked. I mean, not saying that there isn't a lot of legit bad shit going on and being covered up, but a lot of the conspiracy theory stuff out there is just complete bullshit that people share just for the sake of stirring up shit, misdirection from actual real issues, etc. Again, just be careful. At the very least, do a quick search on Snopes.com for anything that seems really crazy so you can potentially get some counterarguments on the issue. Here's the pizzagate Snopes article

Anyway, in updates from me, things have been both good and bad on the COVID front here. On one hand, New Mexico has continued to be pretty good at not fucking things up in our state. My friends David and Ashley finally felt comfortable enough to come down to visit from Albuquerque a couple weekends ago so it was nice to see them. I'll be going up there to visit them for 4th of July weekend. But on the negative side of things, our neighbors Arizona and Texas have just been total shit-shows with handling things so as a precaution we're going back to teleworking 3 days out of the week and just coming into the office on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Yesterday I took a second monitor home to hook up to my work laptop and a 25 ft ethernet cable so I can have a better work set up in my actual office instead of just having the work laptop on my living room coffee table since I needed to plug the laptop directly into my modem. That shit was pretty annoying and uncomfortable. Hopefully this new set-up will be better, and a little less annoying since I'll still also be going into the office regularly. I'll just need to make sure that I have a good system going for transferring my work files between the two work stations.

Not too much else to report. I've been slipping a bit on my anime watching again, mostly due to getting distracted by my indie porn game stuff. I just watched a few episodes of hentai last week to get at least some stuff finished for my self-challenge thing and might end up doing something similar this week as well. =P I've also been watching some stuff simultaneously on Discord with one of my MAL friends each week and that's been an interesting experience. That's why I asked for your Netflix login info (thanks again by the way!); we're going to be watching A Whisker Away this weekend and I'd prefer to watch it on a legit streaming platform since it's available there instead of just torrenting it. I'd especially like to do my part to encourage this kind of release since it was a movie that had an international streaming debut and such. It'd be cool to have more releases similar to this. I mean, this particular situation kind of has COVID-19 to blame, but still. It's pretty cool to see a release like this. Hopefully things will eventually get back to a real level of normal and I can start going to see those limited theater screenings of anime movies that I enjoy so much. ^_^

But yeah, that's pretty much it for me! Talk to you later and hope you have a good weekend!

Haha! Yeah, the Rebuild of Eva movies have been pretty interesting. The first one was almost nothing but a remake of the first half or so of the TV anime, but with a little bit of a WTF stinger at the end. From there, though, things deviated a lot. I’m pretty sure what you saw was the second Rebuild movie since it is the one that introduced the new pilot, a girl with glasses from America. I remember liking that one a lot, thought it was really cool, especially went Shinji grew some balls. XD The third one got rather bonkers, with a weird time-skip and a lot of technobabble. I’ll definitely want to re-watch all of them before I see the fourth one, whenever that comes out. It was originally due to premiere in Japan on 27 June, but got delayed due to the COVID. But it seems like it shouldn’t be much of a delay from this point on, and it’s been nearly 8 years since the third part came out, so what’s an extra few months of waiting?? I’m looking forward to seeing what they do with it.

Yeah, I’ve kind of flirted with the thought of watching Dragon Ball Kai, but it’s still nearly 100 episodes after getting edited down and I’m not a big fan of the franchise anymore, so I’ll probably never watch it. But yeah, that’s cool that the girls are enjoying anime and even reading subtitles! I’m amused by the “Dammit!” stuff. XD

Oh, kind of funny little update about work stuff, my office computer started dying last Friday! Whenever I tried composing an email in Outlook, it would just completely crash Outlook. Our IT guy told me to install all of my pending updates to try to fix it, but after I did that Skype and Word also started crashing when I tried to use them. So half the day today was spent getting me set up on a new computer. The IT guy said that he had to take my hard drive out of my old computer and put it in a different machine in order to transfer my data to the computer that I got set up on because other shit in my old computer was just dying, like the motherboard and network adaptor and such. Fun times!

And yeah, I’ll need to check out your YouTube videos more and see if I can see Carter playing. That’s pretty cool stuff! Is it just the gameplay footage of her playing or do you actually have her in some of the videos? If it’s just the gameplay, does the title mention if it’s Carter playing instead of you?? XD

Now that I’m getting back into a normal work groove, I haven’t been watching too much regular TV anymore either. The only thing I watched since my last comment was Space Force and that was because I’d saw a Steve Carell interview on The Late Show the week before it premiered and it looked interesting to me. I binged it all the Saturday that it came out and I enjoyed it for the most part, but I definitely wouldn’t call it a “great” show by any measure. Also, I feel like a good amount of my enjoyment for the series came from my experiences with the Air Force and how closely I’ve been following politics in recent years. So yeah, not a series I would really recommend to anyone unless the theme interests you a lot. There was an anime reference in one of the episodes, though, so that was kind of cool.

Yeah, I don’t know. It’s coming up on the full 1-month mark since the last time I’ve heard from the girl I was talking to, so I’ll most likely “officially” give up hope that she’ll be talking to me anymore if I don’t hear from her by the weekend and consider myself “ghosted”. I still get really sad/disappointed/confused by it all. Like, she didn’t really seem like the kind of person that would just ghost someone, especially when her last message said that she had a lot of fun hanging out and hopes she can visit again soon. If she was planning to ghost me, I’d think she would have left her message letting me know that she made it home safe as the last message she’d send me. And I’d think that if she really wanted to, she could probably block me on Discord or something so I didn’t see her “online” status anymore and such and continue to send her messages. But again, this weekend if I still haven’t heard from her I’ll just give up and I’ll un-friend her on Discord just so I’m not torturing myself anymore by looking at her username in my side-bar and getting my small hopes up when she pops up as “online”. Even if she’s un-friended, I’m pretty sure she can still send me a message if she does still want to talk. And if nothing else, I gave her my cell phone number so she could at least text me as a last resort. But from my end, I feel like I need to just accept that she’s most likely never going to talk to me again. Oh well.

In other news, I’ve gotten back into a pretty good manga reading groove now! I started doing my lunch break reading again since I’m back to working in the office. Got all caught up with the official releases of the Galko-chan manga that I own and volume five ended up being a pretty good stopping point, so that’s nice. The series seems to release really slowly or something. Then yesterday I randomly checked to see if After School Dice Club might have some new chapters translated, and it did!! Just three or so days prior, a new scanlation group released two new chapters of the manga! And they seem to be a pretty fast group and have a bit of passion for board games, even inviting people to play games with them on Tabletop Simulator on their credits pages, so it seems like the series is in really good hands now. Maybe they’ll catch up with the 15+ volumes that are out now relatively quick and keep current with it from there. That’d be nice. And then one thing led to another that day. I checked up on Do Chokkyuu Kareshi x Kanojo and that series lives again!! That was actually an issue with the manga itself going on hiatus while the creator looked for a new publisher. So yeah, three new full chapters have been released (and probably some little extra mini-chapters as well since the last time you’ve read it), so you should check it out! And then I was like, hmmm, maybe someone might have picked up translating Yumihari (from the creator of Alien 9) since the last time I checked on it?? And yep! The entire series has an English scanlation now!! So I read all four volumes of that, and then read a couple of single-chapter one-shots by the same guy as well as a full-color doujin sequel he did for Alien 9. I used to not be all that comfortable with reading manga on the computer, but I think playing a lot of visual novels lately has trained me to get used to it so it doesn’t bother me so much anymore. It’s nice to read a good amount of manga again. Maybe I can start catching up to you a bit in days of manga read?? Probably not. XD

And that’s about all that’s really going on with me at the moment. Hope you guys are doing well and stay safe with everything going on, with the protests and Trump being all.... “Trump”.... Fuck, this is such a fucking mess. Hopefully things will get better soon. Talk to you later!

Yo Bro!! It’s been a while, aside for the bit of texting we did on my birthday. I was just really out of it while I was teleworking. “Was” being the key word; today was my first day back in the office! We are directed to be careful, wearing masks as much as we can and keeping our distance and such, but it’s still nice to be back to my proper work computer in all its 3-screen glory! And not having the line between work and home blurred anymore is good, too, and not having to fight with the more shitty network issues while working through the VPN.... So yeah, overall I’m really glad to be back in the actual office. It’s kind of weird to not have at least some sense of dread when going to the office, but the frustrations of teleworking really put things in perspective. Plus, who knows what can happen; I could be thrown right back into the telework world any moment. We’ll see, but for now I’ll enjoy having my proper equipment and being in a normal work environment. ^_^

Yeah, I ended up watching some other non-anime stuff while I was still in full telework mode. Watched all six season of Community and really enjoyed that a lot. Then I go into What We Do in the Shadows since my friends David and Ashley have been recommending it to me for a while; watched the original movie and caught up with the TV series (the full first season and the currently airing second season, though I still need to watch last week’s episode). I’ve been enjoying that quite a bit, too, but I wasn’t super into it at first. It wasn’t until a little more than half way through the first TV season when I really started to love it. Not too bad, though, since the season is only 10 episodes. I’ve also been watching the newest episodes of Rick and Morty whenever I’m able to get together with Dan, since we’ve been watching that series together for a while and I don’t want to be a dick. XD Just need to watch last Sunday’s episode now.

With anime since we last talked, I’ve done pretty much no watching outside of my “Finish Them” thing. Unfortunately there haven’t been too many standouts in the last two months, with most things I’ve watched getting a “6” or “7”, reminding me why I fell out of watching them in the first place. XD I did really like Kokoro Connect, though, enough for it to crack my Top 100 in the 80s. I’d really like to read the original light novels at some point. And right now I’m really loving Hyouka. It’s been a little rough to watch because I’m pretty sure it’s the first KyoAni anime I’ve watched since the fire. Sometimes just watching the opening or ending credits will make me cry, just thinking about all of the people who worked on the series who are now dead. It really sucks. But yeah, I went ahead and watched it from the beginning; only had 2 episodes watched before and that was many years ago. I remember not getting super into it back then, but not disliking it either. I think I felt like the male lead was somehow both a more grounded version of Kyon, while also somehow being a more extreme version of Kyon. But watching it again and getting a little deeper into the series, he’s really grown on me, as well as the female lead and the supporting cast. They all have a lot of good chemistry, and the series is really beautiful.

There are a number of things that I’ve been really interested in watching in the current season, but I haven’t tried any of them yet, with me still really focusing on finishing stuff and kind of struggling with just doing that during the telework times. Plus, I refuse to start any new stuff with Dan until we finish the stuff we’ve started together, especially since there are two continuations in this season that are going to be auto-watch stuff for us. I mean, I’m lucky that I’ve at least been able to get him over a couple of times to get three episodes of Rick and Morty watched!

So I played the crap out of Final Fantasy VII Remake after I got it! I think I beat the game within about two weeks, after about 40 hours of playtime. I started to replay the game via “Chapter Select” (basically New Game+) on Hard Mode, but got distracted after Chapter 4 or so. I liked it a lot, though. Personally, I think it’s totally worth checking out. They change up a lot in the game and story, and add a lot to it, fleshing out the story and characters. It doesn’t look like you’ve logged them so I don’t know if you’ll get this reference, but the Remake actually reminded me a lot of the Rebuild of Evangelion movies. Because while this first game mostly followed the first disc of the original, it hinted a lot at how the story could potentially make some major deviations from the original, like the “Remake” might actually be an alternate reality to the original. But I don’t know if that trend will continue with later games. Apparently in a Japanese interview, the creators said that the story won’t deviate much from the original from this point forward. We’ll see! Either way, I’m looking forward to more coming out, whenever that happens. =P

So, funny thing. A little over a month ago I actually had my first good connection come from OkCupid! It was kind of weird because a girl messaged me back on there after I sent her a message back in February. Guess she’s not on the site often. But I sent her my Discord user info and we started chatting back and forth on there and she even came and visited me two weeks ago. It was a lot of fun and I like her a lot. But sadly, after her visit she’d since only sent me two short messages and I haven’t heard anything from her for a little over two weeks now. I’ve sent her a few messages but haven’t gotten any response. I don’t know if she’s just been busy, like something has happened, or if she’s just not into me anymore. I sent her one more message yesterday wishing her a happy birthday (her birthday is the day after mine) and that will probably be the last thing I say to her until she responds, if she ever does talk to me again. I guess I’ll hold out a sliver of hope for another week or so until I completely give up and try looking again. It has really been making me sad since I really like her. The worst part is just not knowing. If she’d just say that she doesn’t want to talk to me anymore, that would suck, but I think I’d get over it soon enough. Oh well. We’ll see what happens....

And I guess that’s pretty much all that’s been going on with me! Hope you and the family are doing well and stay safe out there in the End Times! Laters! ^_^

HOLY FUCKING SHIT MAN!!! How the fuck did you let this happen?! XD Like for reals! When you said that I caught back up with you on days of anime watched, I was initially like, "Nah, there's no fucking way! He's bullshitting me, man, or he miss-read the numbers...." But sure enough, we're neck-and-neck again! I mean, you're back to being a full day ahead of me, but still, I was 9 DAYS BEHIND YOU two months ago!! What the hell, man?! You slippin'. XD I haven't been doing too much crazy anime watching over the last two weeks, though. Part of that is me adjusting to telework and such. While I should potentially be able to watch MORE anime while doing the whole quarantine thing, it's a bit of a disruption to my usual routine and we've been having a LOT of network issues while teleworking which has made it more tiring than normal work in the office. So yeah, I haven't been feeling up to reading subtitled stuff during the week as much lately. Also, early last week an update for a game that I really like called Slay the Spire came out for the console versions and I've been playing the crap out of that, obsessively trying to beat the game with the new character. I finally succeeded in doing that this Tuesday, so I'm able to put that game down now. Although now I'm finally getting into playing Chrono Trigger! That's been a really interesting experience so far. While I'd never played the game before, the game has been extremely nostalgic because of all of the video game music remixes that I used to listen to back in the day. Most notably, finally beating up Gato for his 15 silver points got me because of the remix "Team Gato" and meeting Robo and hearing his theme and playing through the initial part of his story hit me pretty hard because of "The Incredible Singing Robot". Really interesting stuff. I don't know if any other moments will really stand out to me, connecting to my past that strongly, but we'll see! In general, the game has been pretty fun so far and its art is still rather beautiful and charging with its 16-bit sprites and such, even if I'm not the biggest fan of Akira Toriyama's style. Oh! But yeah, aside from my usual obligatory "Finish Them" anime watching, I'm almost finished re-watching Re:Zero (1 episode left!) and since I don't log as I re-watch things, once I update Re:Zero with 1 re-watch, that will give me about half a day worth of anime watching time in one go!! I'm comin' for ya, bro!! XD

But yeah, the pandemic stuff has certainly been a thing! Like I already said, network issues with teleworking has been really annoying. I'm starting to get used to it, though, hence why I'm finally replying to peeps on here again. It really sucks that I began to have a new weekly board game group going, but now that's put on hold until this blows over. At first the main guy was still coming over and the two of us would just game and bullshit, but even he stopped last week because he didn't want to be a hypocrite with his daughter since he said that she can't go to see her friends anymore while this is going on. Which I can understand, but it still sucks. And David hasn't been coming down from Albuquerque to visit anymore and I can't go up to see him, so that sucks, too. Blah, but it's what you got to do and such. Be nice if this only lasts for another month, but who knows?? I might not be able to take my trip to Ohio in May after all.

Haha! You changing your name away from "mikebz" feels a bit like when a changed mine from "drakerain", like, 15+ years ago?? You know, back when I was considering legally changing my name to Drake Rain. XD I actually told David about that a while ago, how it was my "Wiccan Name" and such, and he just laughed his ass off! XD It is pretty funny to think about in hindsight. After that David was actually planning on naming a character Drake Rain in his Ungentlemanly comic, but he's gotten so busy after getting hired on at Level 99 Games that the comic has been put on indefinite hold. Sad. "I" was actually going to be the main character's neo-hippy rival or something. It would have been awesome to see. XD

Yeah, I finished off the first season of Assassination Classroom and enjoyed it well enough, but it was anything that I really loved; got a "7" from me. I talked about it in this "Finish Them" post.

And yeah, like I said, I only have one director's cut double-episode of Re:Zero to watch now. I watched three episodes in one go on Tuesday to catch back up as I was getting a little behind. Those episodes hit pretty hard, with the infamous Rem talk, battle with the White Whale, and Subaru's final tragic death for this anime when he got taken over by "that asshole". I'm looking forward to finishing it (either tonight or tomorrow or Saturday, depending on how I'm feeling). And really looking forward to the continuation. With it delayed until the Summer 2020 season, you have plenty of time still to re-watch the director's cut as well now, if you haven't started it already! I'm hoping that they keep up with the anime adaptations and eventually do the entire story. While I would like to read the original light novels, I kind of doubt I'll ever get around to it with all of the other stuff that I want to read and how slow of a reader I am.

Yeah, I ended up going ahead and pre-ordering FFVII Remake on Amazon a few weeks ago, so that will be another video game distraction for me soon! XD I didn't try the demo, though. I knew that I'd eventually want to play it regardless and would rather just go right into the "full" game and not re-play parts. I'm looking forward to starting it, though! I think this will be my first time in a very long time that I'll be playing a new, big video game right upon release. I don't care that much about the whole "shared experience" thing with entertainment these days, but it's nice every once in a while. Similarly, Ashley (David's girlfriend) was talking about Tiger King in a group chat that I'm in with a bunch of friends here and I was all like, what the fuck? That sounds stupid awesome! And since it's something I could easily watch without devoting my full attention (like I do, and want to, with anime and other story/character focused fiction), I was able to passively watch it in one go while I was teleworking. It's kind of nice to be able to understand all of the Tiger King references that talk show hosts and such make. Like how Trevor Noah did a whole thing comparing Trump to Tiger King. XD

And yeah, I kind of feel you on FFVII Remake, but for me it's been so long since I'd played the original, that I'm totally looking forward to experiencing the story again with a new coat of paint. I mean, I loved the shit out of the remaster of FFVIII when I got into that not too long ago! And I feel like they're adding a lot to make it worth it to me. Although, this might be a bit of a weird thing to get hung up on, but I'm not sure about how I feel about the new uniforms for the Turks. I haven't shaved for almost three weeks since my full quarantine mode has started and I plan to shave again this weekend because this extra-shaggy stubble is getting really annoying. But before I go head and shave everything, I've been playing with the thought of shaving it down to a goatee and clipping on some of my old earrings to look like Rude. So I looked up some pictures of him, and saw that he wears a purple shirt under his suit in the remake??? What the fuck??? In the original (and in Advent Children), Reno was the only one that had a someone different uniform, and even then he just had his shirt unbuttoned with no tie. Why did they feel the need to make Rude's "uniform" so different now to the point that it doesn't even seem like he's in uniform?! What the fuck.... And then there's also the change to his facial hair. I don't know. I've always wanted to cosplay as Rude at some point, but the new Remake design makes things a little needlessly complicated for me now. XD

Yeah, if I don't get any traction on OkCupid, I'm most likely look into Meetup again after the quarantine is over. I still haven't had any good connections come up on OkCupid. *sigh* I mean, not that it matters that much with the pandemic and all, but it'd be nice to at least chat and such with someone I could potentially get along with romantically, even if it never developed into anything beyond online stuff. We'll see, though; I'll keep at it!

And yeah, not too much else going on. Last night we had our third real session of the BESM game that I joined. It went well enough. We're doing it online through Discord now, which went alright. Last week we tried using roll20.net, but with the pandemic they've been having a lot more people using them for games than usual, so their voice chat was running like shit. XD

But yeah, I think that's all from me! Talk to you later, stay safe and all that! ^_^

Haha! Dude, you changed your username??? I got a little confused because I had my profile open, and then later I was clicking on “Conversation” links on my comments to start responding to some comments, and one of them said “retsukun45” and I was like, “WTF? Who is that???” XD Actually, looking at how to change my username, it looks like I’ll have to edit any links I might have made to your profile now that your username changed. =P

I’ve also been busy this past week, but it’s mostly because our network connections have been total crap here. Just been making getting anything done a real chore. Super lame. And yeah, it will be interesting to see how bad this Coronavirus stuff gets. I’m scheduled to go to an accounting conference at the end of April. And then I have a training course that I signed up to go to during the first week of May (the week right after the accounting conference). But if things get worse, who knows if either of those will still happen? I just saw that they went ahead and cancelled E3 this year. I wouldn’t be surprised if they end up cancelling all non-essential TDYs soon (pretty much anything other than military deployments). Hell, I guess there could even be a chance of Sydney’s graduation getting affected, although I do plan to go there no matter what. You know, as long as shit doesn’t REALLY hit the fan and we’re all on full pandemic lock-down or some shit. Since I just plan on driving when I take my leave to Ohio, I don’t really care too much about that, but I’d be kind of nervous flying for those TDYs. We just got some information on telework and stuff here in case of Corona stuff. And today we just had our first three confirmed cases of Coronavirus here in New Mexico. Crazy times.

Hmmm, yeah, I think I’m a little particular about the anime/manga that I double-dip on format consumption. I’ll probably never end up reading Dr. Stone or Demon Slayer unless either’s anime stops at an unsatisfying point. If I’m happy with the anime and don’t have any huge burning desire to read some stuff that might have been left out or ain’t just a huge super-fan of the series in general, I’ll probably just watch the anime. I think most of the stuff that I do double-dip on is pure slice-of-life and shoujo stuff because their typically more chill or dramatic nature is usually really nice to read and you don’t miss out on much in the action department, but it can also be nice to hear the characters and such with the anime. Like I’m really looking forward to starting my read of the Laid-Back Camp manga, even though I’ve watched the anime and it’s coming out with another season. And yeah, I’ve been loving the Galko-chan manga. It works really well in that format and it’s cool that most of it is done in nice semi-colored art. Good stuff! Oh, and after finishing the Genshiken manga, the series went up in my rankings 11 spots, going from #26 to #15 on my series list. Good stuff!

Yeah, I see your gameplay videos pop up in my subscription feed, but haven’t had a chance to watch much of them. I’ve been trying to spend more time watching anime so I usually just pop on YouTube to keep up with my talk shows for my “news” and get off. It’s cool that they seem to be trying to keep up with making improvements to the game and such. Hope you continue to get your groove back. ^_^

Yeahhh, I’ve really been meaning to get around to watching After Story since I made my old Top 100 list back in 2016. XD I’m still debating if I should go back and re-watch the first season of Clannad before watching After Story since it’s been so long. But I don’t know. It’s hard for me to justify spending the time on it, but I also don’t want to lessen the impact of After Story due to the first season not being fresh enough in my mind.... But speaking of re-watching stuff, I ended up going ahead and started “re-watching” Re:Zero via the new director’s cut that’s airing right now. And man, I’m actually loving the series more the second time around! I’m essentially 18 or so episodes in on the re-watch, I think, and I’ve already gone ahead and bumped my “9” up to a full “10” and upped its spot on my working Top 100 by ten or so spots, now sitting as my #36 series. I’m really a sucker for tragedy loop stories. XD I’ve been thinking about doing a blog post talking about me feelings on that storytelling mechanism, but haven’t had the time to start writing it. But yeah, Crunchyroll ended up sticking the Memory Snow Re:Zero “movie” into the spot where it goes in the story for the director’s cut episodes (in between the “mansion” and “capital” arcs), so that’s why I’ve added that to my list recently. It was a nice little fluffy diversion before Subaru truly starts to get utterly fucked by the tragedy loop and his own social inadequacies. And yeah, I really liked Slime. It was pretty good, although it didn’t quite hit the 9-10 score level needed with me to make it onto my Top 100. It kind of felt like the season ran out of steam a bit in the second half or so. Although I’m cool with the more laid-back city building/slice-of-life elements of the second half, it didn’t connect with me quite as well as it could have, like the people behind the anime couldn’t really pull off the “moe” needed to really make slice-of-life work, at least for me. But yeah, I think it’d definitely be worth a watch for you. I think you’d get at least a decent amount of enjoyment out of it.

And yesterday I did end up starting Assassination Classroom back up as my next “Finish Them” thing and got 6 episodes watched last night! Yay progress! I don’t know if I’ll get any watched tonight though because I have a “Session 0” meeting tonight for a BESM game that I’m going to be in. I’m not sure how the game will go, though. There is one person in the group who I don’t particularly like.... We’ll see! But yeah, I’ve been enjoying Assassination Classroom well enough, but I don’t think it’s particularly my thing. Unless the last 6 episodes hit really well, I’m thinking it will probably get a “7” at best from me and I probably wouldn’t care enough to continue with the sequel.

That’s cool that you got back with your anime group again! I wish I could find or start a good anime group here. Or a good board game group. Or both! XD I actually think it’d be cool to start an anime/board game group and have After School Dice Club be the last thing we watch each week, and then play games that were featured in the episode. I think that’d be neat. ^_^ Maybe I’ll getting on Meetup again and maybe start my own group. I don’t know. After how uneventful my online dating profile has been so far, I’m not sure if trying to get a Meetup group going will fare much better. Yeah, still haven’t made a single real connection on OkCupid. Trying to be hopeful, but, meh, I’ve set out so many initial messages with no replies that it’s hard to not get discouraged. But hey, for all I know a “perfect girl” could create her profile tonight and we can connect, etc. Who knows!

Yeah, I was a little tempted to check out the FFVII Remake demo, but figured that the actual release is so close that I might as well just wait a little longer at this point. =P And yep, I’ve been more-or-less following the development of the Remake since it was announced that it was actually being made. I think having the first game end after you leave Midgard is pretty much the perfect spot for the first part. I’ve heard a lot of people talk about that was only “a few hours” in the original game, but I remember it being pretty long! The initial mission, walking around and meeting Aerith, all the stuff in the slums, the sewers, and then the big Shinra building. I mean, it was the entire first disc in the original game! If possible, I think it’d be really nice if they can just finish off the Remake in a single, huge second game, making it a big ass open-world game; I’m just not sure where else they can really have a good natural split in the gameplay like with the destruction of Midgard. But however many games they end up making, hopefully they won’t take too long to make each one from here on out since they seem to have a pretty good grasp of the gameplay mechanics and graphical framework and such. We’ll see!

Hahaha! Yeah, the girls singing an anime song would be really cool to see! And that “Daddy, be quiet!” thing sounds like it was pretty cute, too! XD

And nothing else of note really going on with me at the moment! Talk to you later!! ^_^

Hahaha! Yeah, Ghost Stories is definitely not Boogiepop. XD

I’ve been doing alright with chipping away at my Watching list. Last week I finished off Hanayamata which I had originally started with Des and Dan back when it was airing in 2014. Most of my stagnate Watching items came from late-2011 through early-2015, when we were kind of trying to watch anime regularly, but getting distracted a lot. After that I kind of had a full-on anime drought which prompted me to do the 2017 Anime Watching Challenge to “get my groove back”. Now I’m trying to clean shit up. =P But yeah, I ended up liking Hanayamata quite a bit. It’s pretty much a by-the-numbers “cute girls + activity” slice of life series like K-ON!, but with a rather unique activity of yosakoi, a traditional Japanese festival dance. It squeaked in with a “9” score from me and is currently in the #92 spot of my Top 100 series list, but I don’t know if it will survive until I make a new official post of the list. I haven’t started working on something to finish this week quite yet and I’m not entirely sure what I’ll pick. I might try to finish the first season of Assassination Classroom, or the second season of Railgun, but both of those have more than 10 episodes to watch, so I’m not sure. I was over at Des’ place doing a little gaming yesterday and I’ll be having some other people over at my place for gaming Friday, so I only have three days left to get some anime watching in.... Maybe I’ll just finish off a hentai or two. XD

Dan and I did get A LITTLE more of Slime watched last Sunday. Only 6 more episodes left! But in the meantime we’re getting behind on watching the Madoka Side Story and the 4th season of My Hero. And we haven’t even started Isekai Quartet 2 yet. Ugh, I’m growing more and more apprehensive of watching anime with him. XD I don’t know. Maybe reliably watching anime with him will be more feasible after his new house is fully remodeled. But man, between Madoka, My Hero, and still needing to finish Fire Force and Vinland Saga, I’m still more than 40 episodes behind in anime that I’m watching with him....

Aside from finishing my stagnate stuff, I’d really like to watch most of KyoAni’s stuff that I haven’t seen yet before the one year anniversary of the arson attack on their studio (18 July). I have all of the stuff of theirs that I haven’t seen yet listed in a To-Do List. I’d especially like to at least get Hyouka, Clannad: After Story, and Violet Evergarden watched by July. Hyouka at least is part of my “Finish Them” thing, so that at least would be pulling double-duty! Speaking of Violet Evergarden, thanks for the Netflix access!! I haven’t actually used it for any anime yet, though. So far the only things I have been watching are stand-up comedy specials, mostly all of the ones for John Mulaney. I kind of want to watch Spider-Verse again now; I think I’ll enjoy Peter Porker more after watching all this John Mulaney stuff.

Yeah, I thought Galko-chan was just adorable in the anime and I’m looking forward to starting the manga. I only have one volume of Genshiken left to finish up! I’m really loving getting back into the series. Depending on how it finishes off, it could end up going up a few spots on my list! I’m kind of tempted to just read the last volume when I get home from work, but I should really get some anime watched instead. But I should still get it finished by the end of the week between tomorrow and Friday’s lunch breaks. ^_^

Haha! That sucks about your tournament. XD And that does seem really dumb that they have you make three teams but you’re locked into using one of them. Sounds like something that they either didn’t finish implementing, or something that exists in a different mode of play that they accidently carried over partly into tournament mode, or something. =P Better luck next time, I guess!

I’m looking forward to more Dr. Stone. It kind of seems like a series that I’d be cool with reading the manga for, but anime is just easier. Besides, Weekly Shounen Jump titles can get stupid long really fast if they get popular and Dr. Stone seems like it has potential to go on and on.... I don’t really want to put my shelf through that stress. XD And that’s cool that you’re getting back to working on manga and comics, too. Like I said, I’m at least reading stuff regularly during my lunch breaks now, so I’m slowly but surely getting all of the manga that I own physically read, everything that I didn’t get knocked out last year during my Manga Reading Challenge.

In other news, still no real news in my attempts at online dating. XD

Oh, and yesterday I kind of had to express some disapproval for something that a friend on Facebook posted. He shared a meme that basically expressed that it’s messed up that people in America got all super sad about Kobe Bryant dying, but they don’t give a shit about people who die because of our shitty medical care system. While I personally have no emotional connection towards losing Kobe, I would never try to diminish the grief felt by others and in general I really fucking hate when people try to make a point with this kind of stuff. Entertainment can have a big impact on people’s lives. What’s wrong with them maybe caring a little more about an entertainer’s death than a bunch of strangers? And who’s to say that they really don’t care at all about those strangers?? Back in the day, I really didn’t care all that much about celebrity deaths; I didn’t really “get” being sad when famous people died. But then probably the first death that really affected me was Satoshi Kon. And then also Chester Bennington of Linkin Park. And when the KyoAni fire happened, all bets were off. That is easily the most devastating entertainment-based tragedy for me personally. And when my friend shared that meme speaking lightly of Kobe’s death, I kind of took it personally because when the KyoAni fire happened, some asshat said this on Twitter: “No one cries when thousands of Japanese kill themselves because of capitalist alienation but choose to cry when a few animators die.” So yeah, fuck these kinds of arguments. Especially in the case of this asshole, because if he had done half an ounce of research into the KyoAni fire, he would have saw that they are one of the best (if not THE best) animation studios to work for in Japan, as they rejected the industry standard of forcing animators to work by per-drawing commissions and instead give them a good regular salary. It’s exactly the kind of practices that this fuck-wad should have been applauding and he should have been sad that such a good employer had this happen to them.... But anyway, I talked to my friend about his post in Messenger and after I talked about how it’s kind of a fucked up thing to do, he ended up deleting his post, saying that he would personally be pretty pissed off if someone similarly took the death of Robin Williams lightly to make a point like he did with Kobe. But yeah, on the “upside” though, talking about this stuff with him did have me looking into the KyoAni fire again and I was able to find the identity of the 36th victim, a 24 year old production manager named Anna Asano, so my memorial page is a little more complete now. I also found a few more ANN Encyclopedia entries for people I didn’t have links to before.

And that’s pretty much all that’s going on with me lately! Talk to you later!!

Yeah, I should really start watching some anime on Netflix.... Speaking of which, if you still have a profile slot available on your Netflix, you should totally Message me your login info!! ^_^

And yeah, Sydney was born 2002, the year we graduated high school.... So her age is essentially how far we’ve gone into adulthood (past age 18). I’m still a little tripped out by the fact that I’m turning 36 this year, meaning I can soon legally hook up with a girl half my age! XD Once I told Adrian that Sydney makes me feel old and she was like, “How do you think I feel?!” XD

But yeah, that’s not a problem if you can’t make it up to Dayton around that time. I would like to come down to see you guys for my second week of leave if you’d be able to put up with me, though! We should try to plan something!

Ah, Michiko & Hatchin and Assassination Classroom are two of my stagnate anime that I need to get back to. Maybe I’ll do one of them next. This week for my “Finish Them” thing, I actually revived a series that I previously dropped: Ghost Stories. The reason I had dropped it was because I watched one episode from an old Newtype USA magazine sampler DVD and it bored the crap out of me. But I watched it subbed (because I was pure sub-only by the time this came to the US), and that was apparently a bad idea. If you haven’t heard, this series is famous for its English dub. If you haven’t heard about it, have you at least heard of the Abridged Series of YouTube videos, like Dragon Ball Z Abridged and such? They basically take video from an anime and make joke dubs over it.... The English dub for Ghost Stories is essentially an OFFICIAL Abridged Series. This was an anime that totally bombed in Japan and ADV randomly got stuck with the license for it as part of a package deal. ADV didn’t give a shit about the series and neither did the original creators. As such, the people from Japan basically said that as long as they don’t change a few key things (like the names of characters and how the ghosts are defeated), then ADV could do anything they wanted with the series to try to make it successful. So yeah, they made a really wonderfully horrible joke dub for the series. It’s pretty amazing and I recommend checking it out if you can. It also has a lot of stuff that hasn’t aged well, like liberal use of “retard” and homophobic terminology (calling things “gay” and calling your friend a “fag” and such). The dub was made back in 2005, though, so that kind of stuff was “okay” back then. It actually kind of increases the charm of the series. Some of the stuff they said really made me go like, “Holy shit! That totally would NOT fly these days!” XD

In random blogging news, I made a new list: Top 10 Most Overrated Anime. It’s actually an update to an older list, which I previously gave a long convoluted title because I didn’t want to say “overrated” because I don’t really like how often that term is thrown around. But this time I was like, fuck it, I just say overrated and just specify in the intro that it’s overrated TO ME and for people to not get butt-hurt about it. Although it’s not anyone ever randomly comes across my blog posts anyway. =P

I’m slowly but surely reading more manga myself! Mainly just reading during my lunch break at work since I take a full hour now. I’m working my way through reading the rest of the un-read manga on my shelf that’s left over after doing the Manga Reading Challenge last year. Right now I’m finally reading the “Second Season” volumes of Genshiken. I love that series. Getting back into it has been great, like reconnecting with an old friend. ^_^ I should be finished with it in about two weeks. I think I’ll start reading my volumes of Galko-chan next because I really loved the anime; such a pleasant surprise that was. Too bad no one ever licensed the anime. Ah, and that kind of sucks that I may have to wait until the third season of Dr. Stone for them to start explaining the weird population issues and such with the village. XD

Damn, I should have subscribed to your YouTube channel last time I watched one of your videos! Maybe I’ll try to remember to do that this weekend. Oh, speaking of YouTube, I got inspired to do a video tour of my anime collection. You can watch it here if you’re interested! I might do a few more video tours eventually. The next two I’d probably do would be my manga collection (duh) and my wall art (posters and such). Don’t know when I’ll get around to doing those, though.

And that’s mostly all that’s going on with me! Still haven’t gotten any responses from my attempts at online dating. I did get that “A-List” thing, but was kind of annoyed by it. One of the main things I wanted it for was to be able to see when people read my messages, that way I’d know when to move on if a girl reads my message but doesn’t respond after a while. But seems like you can only see if someone reads something if you’ve already liked each other! That’s a little useless.... Actually, I do have two girls that have liked me and I liked them back. I messaged them both, but neither have responded.... That was a little discouraging. Oh well. Hopefully I can actually connect with someone for real eventually! On the up side, David is coming to town to visit this weekend and is planning to spend damn near all day Saturday hanging out with me! Hopefully that goes well and we can game and bullshit about various stuff. ^_^

But yeah, that’s legit all that’s going on with me. Have a good weekend! Laters!

Yeah, I like Yui, too, but I pretty much like all of the characters in the series. I mean, for K-ON! to be one of my top favorites I kind of have to like the characters with the type of series it is. I’d like to re-watch the anime sometime now that I read the manga last year. It’d be nice if they animated the sequel content, but KyoAni is probably done with the series at this point, and some of the key people who worked on the series died in the fire.... But yeah, Highschool and College both have some really good moments in them. In a way, Mugi has a lot of the best moments in Highschool even though she herself isn’t in that volume much. She is there a lot in spirit through her “little sister” (kind of adopted) who joins the club after the main girls graduate. And Yui has a lot of the best moments in College because she forms an interesting bond with one of the girls they meet from a different band. Good stuff! I recommend the manga if you can find access to it. You don’t necessarily have to read the original 4-volume series as well since the anime pretty much covers all of that, but it’s not a very long read if you want to read it anyway. The anime-original sequel movie is also pretty fun.

Haha! Yeah, watching things regularly on Crunchyroll, Funimation, and such tends to help keep me on track with watching things week-to-week. Although if I’m not getting on the PS4 apps regularly, I do tend to fall behind. I actually need to make sure I do some watching of something soon so I can continue working on my “Finish Them” thing. I haven’t watched anything for that yet this week. I’ve mainly been getting distracted by OK Cupid. =P

And yeah, still no “nibbles” or responses to the messages I’ve sent on there yet. This weekend I might go ahead and pay for a month of “A-List” on there so I can see read receipts for the messages I send and see the people who like me. With a basic free account you only see if someone likes you if you happen to like them as well. Blah. Kind of annoying, but I guess they have to make their money somehow. The unfortunate thing with me is that I just don’t naturally meet dateable girls very often, and especially not in a situation conducive to getting to know each other better. I don’t get out much and there aren’t many places around other than bars where you can just meet people. Hence why I’ve turned to online dating.

I actually don’t have any other new stuff to talk about other than one thing: I’ll be going up to Dayton in May for Sydney’s high school graduation! It will be the 24th of May (my birthday!) which is a Sunday, so I ended up just taking leave for the week before and the week after and I’ll be driving there. I was thinking if you’re available, maybe we can meet in Dayton, or after the graduation I can come down to see you guys at your place during my second week of leave before I go back home. What do you think?