It annoys me that there isn’t a single decent figure of Miyuki Shirogane from Kaguya-sama: Love is War. Ideally they’d sell Kaguya & Shirogane figures that pose together like they did for the main characters of Skip and Loafer, but unless I want a Nenderoid I can’t get anything at all of him. He’s the main character. All the girls have piles of options, because of course they do.

That sounds great for when I need to get from the Jordan River to somewhere else by the Jordan River and less great for anything else.

My wife looked it up, and she actually found the European demon that showed up! https://www.deliriumsrealm.com/pruflas/

Started a couple of shows this week, and here are my impressions:

• Chihayafuru - SungWon/ProZD has been talking this show up for years, and since it’s recently been featured on the Quest for the Best podcast I finally decided to give it a try. It seems fun! I wasn’t sure about it initially since the first couple of episodes very much feel like the “let’s be mean to Chihaya and Arata for no goddamn reason” show but now that I’m about 5 episodes in it’s become fun to watch the main character bulldoze through her problems.
• Nyaight of the Living Cat - A zombie apocalypse is going down, except instead of zombies it’s cats. Anyone who allows a cat to cuddle up with them turns into one! Fun writing, great voice acting, mediocre animation. Might be better to read the manga tbh.

I’m also coming up on the end of season 1 of Ghost in the Shell: Standalone Complex. Episodes 20 & 21 were awesome, so I look forward to finishing the first season soon.

It was on this day that Metal Knight learned there actually is value in not having everyone in the Hero Association think you’re their enemy.

Also, love those panels of Tank Top Master praising the comparative flexibility of the tanktop and offering to hand one out to those in need.

There’s also a third problem: visual context. Someone translating a manga or anime would normally be able to see what’s happening, which can be essential when translating certain otherwise-ambiguous lines.

Maybe that works if you’re translating large blocks of text, but when it’s small bits of isolated text where the viewer is expected to have visual context which the LLM won’t have it’s a hot mess. I tried experimenting with some translation software on a page of manga and it got a lot of stuff wrong.

Did you transcribe and translate that yourself? Thanks!

only kinda know of nichijou because of a meme (good morning evernyan! Oh my gah!) but so far I’m really digging this. I don’t get the connection tho??

That’s Azumanga Daioh, hence the confusion. If you look up something that’s actually from Nichijou the resemblance is obvious.

The art style is really cool and I was kinda shocked because I’ve never seen anime try to emulate depth of field like this before.

I think it’s probably the simplistic character designs that make it possible for the animators to go above and beyond with their cinematography. Simplistic character designs, talent, and hard work.

Stuff from last season:

• Apothecary Diaries - A solid ending for a solid show. Glad to say I liked the final episode of the season more than the penultimate one.
• Apocalypse Hotel - This show started out good and then very quickly became great. I was worried there wasn’t enough material to keep a team of robots running a hotel interesting but they certainly proved me wrong! Hard to say whether this or Mobile Suit Gundam GQuuuuuux was anime of the season for me.

Stuff from this season:

• The Summer Hikaru Died - A highly-rated horror yaoi manga brought to animation by the same studio that gave us Bang Brave Bang Bravern and the aforementioned Apocalypse Hotel. The first episode was pretty solid. Overall it looks pretty good, which is no guarantee when it comes to horror manga. Definitely good enough to get me interested in episode 2.
• City: The Animation - Same mangaka and animation studio as Nichijou, and it shows in all the right ways. It seems a little calmer than Nichijou so far, but that could very easily be because it spent most of its runtime introducing a wide cast of characters. Excited to see where it goes from here.
• Witch Watch - Witch Watch continues. It’s fun, but I’m not sure it holds up to the other shows I’m discussing here.
• Nyaight of the Living Cat - Haven’t seen the first episode yet, but I’m putting this here just to say I’ve seen the trailer and I am very intrigued. Hopefully I can rope my wife into watching this with me tonight.

Other stuff:

• Yakitate Japan!! - I mentioned this earlier, but this is an anime about making bread that’s better than another guy’s bread. There are bread tournament arcs and everything, judged by a zany character who is voiced by my favorite voice actor. It’s a wild time; I highly recommend it to anyone who wants a fun old relatively low-stress thing.
• Ghost in the Shell: Stand-alone Complex - I don’t know if I have much to say about this other than it’s good sci-fi and those who like good sci-fi should consider watching it.
• Gintama - I got back on the Gintama train recently. I’m somewhere around episode 220 and it continues to be funny as hell.
• Princess Jellyfish - My wife has been watching this one, and I’ve watched about an episode and a half with her. Seems like a good show; I’ll likely finish it at some point but I have no idea when.

I agree, Vivy was great. Really unfortunate that it got buried among the other great shows that keep coming out. I’d like to give it a rewatch but I have no idea when I’ll have the time with all this other anime to watch.

Horror yaoi? Looks fun. I didn’t love how the episode ended but I really enjoyed the rest of it and will definitely be giving episode 2 a look as well. The way “Hikaru’s” face melted when asked if he was really Hikaru was great.

They may not have been the highest-effort OP and ED, but it’s still pretty cool that they made an OP & ED just for the show the characters were watching in-universe.

Trailer here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MuWL_UPoGU

As a Fullmetal Alchemist fan I’m very much looking forward to this.

Felt a lot calmer than Nichijou, but maybe that’s just their respective OPs fooling me. IIRC Nichijou itself also takes a while to become truly great so I’m looking forward to what kind of gags we get once we’re through with the first wave of character introductions.

I’m sure some people liked it but that scene where everyone was talking about how great Gokuraku is felt pretty forced to me. “And then everybody clapped.” All the same, great manga and I look forward to seeing what the next arc brings us.

I don’t think there’s an industry on earth where it’s normal for the low-level workers to be paid directly when the customer buys something. It being filtered through a bunch of business stuff is the norm everywhere I’m afraid.

Yes, but do you think they’d buy the shows from those production committees and other organizations if people weren’t interested in paying subscriptions to watch them? That’s like saying Bandai doesn’t get money when I buy gunpla from a store like usagunplastore just because usagunplastore already bought the gunpla from Bandai months ago and Bandai isn’t getting more money from that particular purchase.

Animators being horribly underpaid is a different topic entirely.

That’s without even discussing the fact that not a single penny users give them will end up in the hands of any of the exploited artists who actually made the shows

That’s quite the assertion. How exactly do you suggest they’re buying the rights to distribute the shows then?

given that there are still plenty of passionate fans who would have done it for free

I’d imagine this is a non-starter from a corporate standpoint. I know if I were in charge I’d be terrified of the idea of just trusting community-submitted subtitles to not have random slurs or something inserted. That said I still think it would be super cool if they’d let people source and use their own subtitle files; I now it’s possible because I have a tampermonkey script that lets me do just that.