Manga

All caught up on tons of stuff that's still coming out, 10 different tabs open on my phone permanently waiting for an update. I have to have better self-control and only start things that are totally finished. In order of quality: Kill Six Billion Demons (it counts), Chainsaw Man, Bocchi the Rock, One Punch Man (honestly this would be higher if Murata could lower his standards and just draw new chapters), the Elden Ring Manga, Bocchi the Rock: Kikuri's Drinking Diary, Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint, Kagurabachi, Oshi to no Yuri wa Arienai (this is like the third time I've started reading something yuritopiaposadism posted and got caught up to some yuri thing with like a dozen chapters or less. I hereby award myself the ). You may note that was only 9 entries. Well, after finally giving up on my copium that it's totally going to get a Season 2 after 11+ years, I read through...

Monthly Girls' Nozaki-Kun is good to great, depending on the chapter, and all of the characters are extremely likeable. A four-koma comedy manga, the premise is that one of the most popular up-and-coming shojo mangaka is... a guy in high school who knows nothing about love or girly things (and comes off as asexual, besides). A bunch of various characters who will never actually end up together because that would ruin the central joke of the manga make up the rest of the cast (also, Mikoshiba is there). Despite it having run for well over a decade at this point, there are only 153 chapters currently translated to English, with IIRC a handful more still untranslated. I just want there to be more! I even read the "spinoff", aka...

Monthly Girls' Nozaki-San is alright, not as good as the mainline. It's set several years after the main series, starring the male lead's younger sister, who is now in high school and obsessed with trying to recreate shojo manga in real life. She's also a big fan of the manga her older brother writes, but, despite him repeatedly telling her that he does, she denies that he could possibly be the author. Curiously, this was apparently the original premise and was dropped in favor of Nozaki-Kun, which was probably the right idea.

Vagabond is, in contrast, a manga that will never have an ending as it's on permanent hiatus, and I recently "finished" it. It's a fictionalized version of the life of Miyamoto Musashi, and to a lesser extent, his rival Sasaki Kojiro. Overall some interesting things, but the philosophy of "hey maybe devoting your life to murdering people is bad and doing it with a weapon that has been obsolete for a century is even more pointless" is kinda so basic that I don't get much out of it. As usual for this genre, it also has the problem of Musashi, every other cool character, and swordfighting in general be depicted as cool and badass. The farming arc was nice, at least. As an aside, I also think it's weird to take Sasaki Kojiro, a real person from history, and just make up that he was deaf.

Anime

Haven't been watching anything, but still have a bunch of things on my list that I'll get to eventually. That'll be slower than usual, though, because lots of my "TV" time is currently being taken up by...

???

I'm watching the vods of a streamer reading through Umineko. He's now on the second episode with the RAT and I cannot wait to see some of the reactions he'll have when the story doesn't go the way he wants . As someone who read the manga but not the VN, I find it very interesting to compare and contrast elements that are missing from one or the other. That aside, the music and VA work is very impressive.

Western TV

Andor S2 starts off slow but gets better toward the end. The worst parts of the series are all related to it having to slot into a pre-existing timeline or it being a Disney property. Not really possible to have a revolution driven by any rational ideology when the canon is that the New Republic are a bunch of ineffectual liberal buffoons that get blown up by the New Order to exist 30 years later so a new series of dogshit movies can be made.

Severance S2 has similar pacing and ideology problems, but is otherwise good. I also think it suffers from actually giving concrete reasons for many "mysteries" which I think worked better as metaphors.