ablackenedrose

Tried and failed to chain my way through the first chapter of Ikaruga. Still can't do it, but I'm slowly getting better at it.

I wonder if I could talk my local movie theater into printing this on ticket stubs.

It's become significantly more accessible, and by that I mean it's easier to find and watch. At least where I lived, anime used to be the kind of thing you had to specifically seek out on television schedules (often at weird hours), go digging through video/DVD rentals for, or figure out how to use torrents and file-sharing services, etc. Now, there are numerous streaming services that offer anime as part of the package, and of course entire services exist almost exclusively to stream anime. Finding relatively reasonably-priced Blu-Rays is as simple as opening Amazon. In effect, anime consumption has become a lot more normalized and mainstream, though I'm not sure if the greater accessibility is the cause, effect or both. While I sometimes nostalgically pine for the days of frantically watching fansubbed anime in three parts on YouTube (because there was a sizable chance it would be copyright struck sooner than later), if more widespread acceptance of anime means newer generations don't have the experience of being shamed for liking it, I'd say that's worth it. What really spells it out is when I was buying some manga in my local major bookstore recently. Time was, said bookstore chain had maybe one shelf for manga volumes, and you were seen as "weird" for buying it (I actually had a clerk comment once "Shouldn't you be reading real books?"). Nowadays there's two full aisles for manga and light novels. The clerk (an elderly woman) had a Frieren pin and eagerly asked for recommendations for new anime, while another, younger clerk gushed about how much she loved Witch Hat Atelier. No way in the world would that have happened even a dozen years ago.

Started up The Color of the End, which as of writing has three volumes out in English. Seems to take a decent amount of influence from BLAME!, what with the advanced-yet-desolate urban sci-fi setting and highly decompressed visual style. Quite enjoying thus far.

Living in Florida, I'm fortunate enough to have a decent number of cons to potentially attend, though the only one I consistently attend is Metrocon over in Tampa.

Honor and Devotion, inspired by Space Marine 2.

On one hand, I was entirely unaware of this, and on the other, I am not surprised in the slightest. Nothing done with this IP can shock me after they made a fully Hollywood film out of it, frankly.

I enjoyed it well enough, but I'll warn you it's quite a violent story. It also has a tendency to jump around quite a bit following numerous characters, none of which I can really call morally "good" without some qualification. That said, the influence of the Mahabharata is evident and gives it a rather different feeling to the many European-inspired fantasy worlds to be found in western fantasy literature, and the plot and character work overall is fairly solid. It's a somewhat cautious recommendation from me.

I've already finished the first Mistborn trilogy and am planning to get to Wax and Wayne at some point. I did read the first three books of Stormlight Archive, but that was back in 2018; eight years on, I've forgotten enough of the series to necessitate a full reread just to read Rhythm of War and Wind and Truth and I'll confess that I just don't feel up to it. (The fractured response of the fanbase to Wind and Truth doesn't help, either.) Personally, I'm just starting up Grave Empire. I've had a thing for fantasy settings undergoing industrialization since playing Dishonored however many years ago, so the book's blurb was practically catnip to me.

Huh, wasn't aware Elantris had sequels planned. Always took it for a one-off. Might pencil in some time for those when they release...

I read quite a lot (currently at 35 books read this year, a bit of a slump). I'll give almost anything a try and enjoy works from a broad variety of genres, but I'm particularly partial to dark/epic fantasy, science fiction (I'll take any level of hardness) and supernatural horror.

Blazing heat and high humidity, though that's nothing new for this time of year, nor is the few days of thunderstorms the weather stations claim we have coming down over the next few days.

For me, it's characters - above all else, you have to make me care about your characters, and that goes for every single genre of anime. They can be wonderful people, they can be terrible people, they can be laser-focused on a single objective or just living their day-to-day lives, but an anime absolutely must get me to want to watch those characters do their thing, whatever that "thing" is. You can have all the grand conflicts you want going on, all the wild powers you can imagine or the most incredible animation ever put to screen, but if I don't care about the characters caught up in those conflicts or wielding those powers or who are so lovingly animated, I'm not going to stick around.

I cannot wait to be emotionally built up and then destroyed all over again

Mostly spent the first half of today reading the last couple hundred pages of a novel I've been reading through on-and-off for the last couple of weeks (Sons of Darkness by Gourav Mohanty, if you're curious). Quite enjoyable, though I've no idea when I'll find time for the sequel.

Right, looks like I'll need to pencil in a theater visit sometime in 2027...

I'd probably pick Armored Trooper VOTOMS. Easily one of the grittiest mecha shows ever made and also one of the best. Excellent plot and compelling central mystery and well-written characters, in a setting that's "grimy futuristic", if you will. Yeah, the tech is obviously absurdly advanced, but every frame brings across that the Atragius galaxy is a fairly awful place to live, being in the aftermath of a galaxy ravaged by a century-long war that's left deep scars. I also find VOTOMS' presentation of its mecha (called "Armored Troopers" or ATs) quite interesting and fairly unique. You know how in many/most mecha shows, the mecha (or at least the one the protagonist pilots) is some terrifying engine of death, a mighty god-machine that strides/flies through the battlefield, unchallenged by anything except a fellow near-peerless machine? Yeah, that's averted completely in this show. The ATs are mass-produced weapons of war built on the cheap and there is never any pretense otherwise. The protagonist changes machines quite a few times as they get damaged, disabled and/or blown up.

Just started up the second volume of Witch Hat Atelier, which yes, was motivated by the anime's first season conclusion (on a massive cliffhanger, no less!). Coco is somehow even more endearing on-page than she is on-screen.

I particularly appreciate the English dub's inclusion of in-universe slang into the dialogue - adds a nice extra level of authenticity and really makes it feel like Night City.

Just finished up Fractale, which I thought was all right. I enjoyed it well enough, but the chance I'll ever watch it again is extremely low. Picked up Last Exile to replace it, and I'm having a great time. Hopefully this continues throughout the entire show.

Just started up Bloom Into You and Insomniacs After School, the latter as part of my ongoing effort to actually make use of that HiDive subscription I'm paying for. Bloom Into You clicked right away and unless it goes completely off the rails, I'll be happy to finish it. Insomniacs After School hasn't quite gotten there after the first episode, but I'll give it the standard three.

A big bowl of rice.

Currently partway through A Place Further Than The Universe and have been keeping up weekly with Witch Hat Atelier. (The latter is one of the few times I've ever watched something week-to-week as it came out.)

Mostly use Crunchyroll - sure, plenty of ports exist for sailors of the high seas, but I don't keep my computer hooked up to a television in my living room with a comfy couch. Watching anime on a couch on a decent-size TV is a vastly, vastly more pleasant experience for me than watching anime hunched over my laptop, and my smart TV (gotten for free from a previous roommate who was looking to downsize) let me have that experience with ease.

I do read one or two manga series, but I watch far more anime, in large part because I don't need to store streamed anime physically. I don't live in the most spacious of accommodations and don't have that much room to store manga volumes, and trying to read manga on an E-reader generally results in a dramatically worse reading experience for me.