I have been continuing reading chainsawman current arc is good but its at the action part so not much story is going on for now but its still good to me

I started getting up to date with spyfamily and im at the henry and martha which is backstory for both since it thats place during the first war between westalis and ostasia, its pretty good drama

I wanted to re start jojolands but i think they got got in the mangadex sue so i will probably read it later

I remember watching gravity falls with my sister we really liked it, i also never understood all the hate mabel got, also i should finish andor season 1 oneof this days

-Kinnikuman Perfect Origin Arc:

-Yawara!:

- Megalo Box & NOMAD: Megalo Box 2:

- SSSS Gridman & SSSS Dynazenon & GRIDMAN UNIVERSE:

DragonBall Daima: It was fun, not much interesting to say. But I liked it, felt like a decent blend of original DB adventure stuff with the meat-headed power-level bullshit from DBZ.

Gundam Thunderbolt: December Sky & Bandit Flower:

Nadia: The Secret Of Blue Water

You're Under Arrest

Honestly this is a problematic fave of mine as well, I call YUA one of my "comfort anime". I think I was introduced to this anime through literally a Modern Talking AMV, or maybe it was the "Kawaii Polizei" AMV.

I like the trans character and can find some like cosmic irony kind of humor in how she gets treated sometimes, but other times it's like... phweeh, that wasn't a particularly nice thing to do to her!

Ranma 1/2 (1989)

Pog, I've been thinking of continuing it, but I probably mentioned that last month, too.

Tokimeki Tonight, Dragon Ball Z

I saw the first episode of TT and the first episode of OG Dragon Ball a long time ago, and I keep wondering if I should continue them, too.

Gravity Falls

Mabel and Dipper are both good kids, I don't know what people are on about. I remember mentioning that I had rewatched the first episode of Gravity Falls not too long ago, but I haven't continued my rewatch since then.

Anime:

Finished:

I finished High School Fleet by myself. It was decent, not top-tier but I was definitely too harsh on it when I was first getting into anime. I also recently finished Ameku MD: Doctor Detective with my mom — aside from the scene in the burning building it was pretty consistently a good 'un. The episode with the kid with cancer really fucked me up.

Paused:

I tried getting back into Angelic Layer but it really isn't interesting me that much, so I've put it on pause, again.

Continuing:

Sailor Moon is the only anime I've been watching alone lately. I finished episode 36 earlier today, and honestly I'm starting to get fairly invested in the story. By this point we've got the Big Reveal about Usagi and Mamoru's backstories, and we've got a total of five sailor guardians and two kitty cats in the gang, and I'm already starting to grow fond of the newest additions to the team. So yeah, I won't call Sailor Moon the GOAT of mahô shôjo — that honor still belongs to Cardcaptor Sakura — but Sailor Moon is definitely still up there.

My mom and I have been continuing Samurai Champloo, Ojamajo Doremi, Cells at Work: Code Black, The Disappearance of Nagato Yuki-chan, and Do It Yourself!. That last one we've ended up in the "don't want to watch the last episode cause we don't want it to be over" phase with; Samurai Champloo my mom has also only grown more and more fond of, despite "that kind of show not usually being her style". We've just seen my own favorite episode, the one with the graffiti and Andy Warhol parody.

And I might as well mention now that mom and I are still watching The Boondocks, and we still haven't finished season 3.

Started:

I also recently started watching Squid Girl season 2 with mom, but to my surprise and chagrin, the season 2's dub voice cast is completely different from season 1's — except for Squid Girl herself and a random dog! And I just cannot get past the one character having a familiar voice but everybody else sounding completely different, especially with the somewhat questionable audio quality or mixing. So we've just ended up watching the show subbed. And I'm gonna say now that Squid Girl season 2 doesn't seem as good as season 1 to me, but at the end of the day it is still more Squid Girl, so you can only complain so much.

Blorptube:

On Blorptube I've recently started arranging watch parties for the 1982 cartoon Once Upon a Time... Space (or Galaxy Patrol PJ / Ginga Patrol PJ) — which counts as anime because it's a Japanese co-production. I'm using the official YouTube uploads, which unfortunately caused a problem once as one of the episodes ended up being the French dub, and we had to rely on the machine translation of the machine transcription of what the characters were saying. Otherwise, while OUAT...S is a fun show, the music use and audio mixing is just way off, like there were times I could hardly understand what characters were saying in English because of the blaring, omni-present synth music. Synth music which is good in isolation, just used poorly.

OUAT...S is a continuation from Once Upon a Time... Man, but rather than being an educational cartoon it's pure sci-fi. It's also the first OUAT show to feature Mercedes and I believe also Pierrot, who will be seen again in future cartoons in Albert Barillé's canon. Mercedes in particular I couldn't help but notice gets, like, all the sakuga in OUAT...S — and another person in the chat said that OUAT...S REALLY wants you to know which characters have boobs.

On Blorptube otherwise I've been arranging watch parties for My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, and we're going to finish season 3 and start season 4 the coming Saturday. Moreover, we're also gonna watch the first Equestria Girls movie then, and Equestria Girls is basically the closest MLP G4 gets to being a typical anime: imagine putting Uma Musume (I'm assuming — I haven't actually seen it) with Precure and some third thing that's basically an amalgamation of every slice of life comedy anime about teen girls ever made, in a particle collider, and that's basically the picture.

Otherwise for the Saturdays we've finished JJBA, I wasn't really following along on that; and we've started watching Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water, which I also haven't followed along on super closely because I literally just finished watching that with my mom like a month or two or three ago.

Manga:

With my mom I've been reading Laid-Back Camp and Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken. They're OK, but not necessarily as good as the anime.

By myself at work I finished reading Yotsuba&! and got back into reading Aria, both in the original Japanese. These are both really precious manga that come highly recommended from me, reading them in Japanese is also a great learning resource — everybody says that for Yotsuba&! but it really holds for Aria as well.

Honestly, I've been meaning to get back into the Aria anime as well, but I kinda feel like the story might work better as a manga?

I started Witch Watch and Apothecary Diaries while I wait for Dan Da Dan Season 2

Things that are actually good:

To Be Hero X: this one is amazing. It's the first mostly-CGI anime I've ever looked at and thought "this actually looks pretty good and genuinely does not detract from its quality at all," and it cuts away to absolutely gorgeous traditional artwork when it matters which it stylizes wonderfully in a way that's just visually stunning. The soundtrack is also phenomenal, as expected of Hiroyuki Sawano. Even the writing seems pretty decent, kind of like BNHA with better themes and worldbuilding and conveys a much stronger message of "everything about the world in this setting sucks and is toxic, actually, and we're going to show you exactly why it is bad and actively hurts everyone involved repeatedly and clearly" than BNHA is ever willing to do. Strongly recommend, absolutely top tier so far.

The Red Ranger Becomes an Adventurer in Another World: this is a very silly, self-aware shitpost of a concept, with an already-superpowered protagonist getting isekaid from one cliched genre to another in a way that textually clashes and confuses everyone involved. The animation is mostly ok but doesn't do anything that stands out, and its CGI is bad but not as bad as CGI can be. The writing is a pretty good parody of both genres it's riffing on and it's delivered with a shiteating grin that you can almost feel. It's dumb, light fun that seems to have a decent core to it and is full of lines like this:

A Ninja and an Assassin Living Together: did I mention this last month? I can't remember. Either way, it's a very cute and extremely tonally dissonant series that manages to blend lighthearted silly yuri with absolutely harrowing plot points and scenes. Very enjoyable.

Garbage I found that I just have to rant about:

Gonna Be the Twin-Tail!!: I don't even know how I found or wound up watching this absolute garbage. I mean I like trash, I like piling up a big pile of trash and going "yim yum, look at all this trash", but this is just a baffling level of garbage that somehow manages to be extremely problematic and incoherent nonsense without falling to the level of shit like Highschool of the Dead. It's a gender-bending magical girl/sentai show that literally revolves around twin-tailed hairstyles and weird otaku aliens with weird hyperfixated but mild fetishes who just sort of show up somewhere to leer and go on creepy rants about their particular fixation before dying. The translation is also bizarre enough that I genuinely don't know how much of it is accurate to the source material (oh right, this is an adaptation of a LN series with 21 fucking volumes somehow, which fortunately/unfortunately have never been translated and only four of which were adapted into the anime) and what's "artistic" interpretation, but holy fuck is it incoherent, baffling, and awful to the point that I'd assume it was a channer fansub if not for the fact that it also has a dub and so seems to have official subtitles. Despite how completely awful it was I kind of wish the LNs were translated because I'm morbidly curious about this absolute fever dream of a story now. There is absolutely nothing to recommend about this: it's a confusing pile of uncomfortable garbage that's too incoherent to even hate watch, and it also just sort of ends with the villains -- and I am not exaggerating even a little -- just sort of going "we have other things to do, so we're leaving now" and leaving.

On the recommendation of @WizardOfLoneliness@hexbear.net I've been reading The Isekai Doctor and really enjoying it. A very good doctor gets thrown into a fantasy world where humans have monopolized healing magic and proceeds to do modern medicine for, and teach modern medicine to, all the other people in his new home. It's very reminiscent of Dr. Stone in that it frequently has half or even whole pages dedicated just to carefully explaining actual medical science and techniques.

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.

Have been rereading Naruto in full color. Pretty fun, I had forgotten how quick each issue is. Almost through the pre-Shippuden arcs and while it's a lot of nostalgia, it's actually pretty cool.

Almost finished with Guards! Guards! as well. Terry Pratchett is very funny, I'm enjoying this more than The Light Itself, but that hooked me eventually as well.

I have started on one piece (again) even though I am (1) far too old for one piece and (2) actually very time poor because I'm an honours by research student. Around 100 chapters in which is close to where I gave up last time because the place I was reading changed from a pretty good translation to one that was so piss-poor I couldn't figure out what was going on - I got up to the initial meeting with Dorry and Brogy iirc. This time I'm just past the entry into Grand Line, Luffy has promised to come back and duel the whale and they're fighting their way out of whiskey peak after the betrayal.

It's still a fun read! Maybe overrated but as I say I'm really not the intended audience.

Just One Piece clips. I fell off the show around the time Frankie was introduced. Wasn't feeling the silliness at the time, I guess. I think I'll just pick up now instead of catching up with a decade of shows.

Finished Psycho-Pass S1 (great, of course) and Demon Lord 2099 (pretty good, surprisingly), about to finish Bakuman S1 (also good). I started A Wild Last Boss Appeared! A while back but haven't kept at it for weeks.

Where are you at in Andor?

Manga:

Gunnm/ Battle Angel Alita (6/9 vol): Got my hands on the large format hardcover prints of this, and it's a delight! I'm mostly disappointed that I'll probably have to read the sequels (David Lynch voice) on a fucking cell phone. I'll have to revisit the Robert Rodriguez movie when I'm done lol.

All You Need is Kill: I think I saw the American movie adaptation, but haven't read the LN. This manga adaptation was entertaining enough, but I wouldn't go out of my way to read it.

Anime:

Super Robot Wars OG: the Animation: Solidly mid OVA! Couldn't recommend it, but it was fun enough.

Mobile Suit Gundam GQuuuuuuX (8/??): This one's been a blast so far. I'm hoping we get a 26+ episode run.

Mobile Suit Gundam AGE (40/49): Underrated Gundam AU. Still wondering how they'll end this one.

Eureka Seven (42/50): I'd probably blast through my last few episodes if I wasn't busy with work and also doing a weekly watch-along with a podcast. This one's probably headed towards my favorites, alongside Turn A Gundam lol. I also downloaded the PS2 games to try.

Overman King Gainer (5/26): Haven't gotten to into this one yet. Still, I love the animation for the OP.

Edit: Robot Carnival: How the fuck did I forget to mention this (hint: I watched it like a month ago). Fantastic short film collection OVA all themed around robots. If you like cool 80s OVAs, watch this one - it's amazing! My favorite short is a super robot short set during the Meiji era.