2025, Q2 - So Many Second Seasons

The first season of "Severance" is one in the long line of apple exclusives that in my mind is better than it has any right to be. It borrows the language of the corporate culture and strips away everything that would likely be brought to the office by the outside lives of the workers, non-diegetically by way of set design and diegetically through the Severance procedure. I find it heartening that it resonated so strongly, at least with media journalists and reviewing audiences, given its themes of workplace alienation. Seeing as I've never been part of a work-force outside of an economic recession and I've been exposed to counter-propaganda before the corpo-speak ever had the chance to take hold, I've never not been in agreement with the core messages of the show. It's perhaps not the subtlest show, whether it be in its messaging or it's methods of seeding future twists, but I've been growing to think that that's perhaps a good thing when making counter-hegemonic statements. The first season ends on an episode with many very interesting revelations, which while inevitable from the outset of the show, will likely make for a very second season, which at the point I started watching the show was already concluded.

I'm not sure where I first heard about the play "Waiting for Godot". It's been on my reading list for a while, but seeing as I don't read very many plays, it's always eluded me until I came across a used copy in French, German and English. It looks like it was a study copy, complete with earmarks and the occasional underline in pencil. Charming, in it's own way. The play itself is perhaps the most comical depiction of boredom I've read so far. Clearly, not many works focus primarily on boredom and what it does to those who are exposed to it beyond their resilience, so perhaps it doesn't have much competition. If I were forced to classify it, I'd file it under dark comedy, in the same way that many of Kafka's works fall under dark comedies in my mind, and yet while I understand how those same works of Kafka could be tragedies or dramas, or even thrillers, "Waiting for Godot" could really be nothing but a comedy. It is laced with uncomfortable cruelty and none of the characters depicted are consistent over the three days they convene and reconvene. It's not really a play where nothing happens, rather, the event that is expected to occur never comes around, which is perhaps even more telling than the odd behaviors that those waiting exhibit.

"Makeine" is a very cozy show. Slice of Life anime has changed since the days of Lucky Stars. It used to be a genre where structurally, very little happened, but now it's become kind of an excuse to side-step tropes that I'm often not fond of anyway. As such, I've started to grow fond of the genre, or perhaps it's better to say "the trappings" since the lines of genre have been failing very reliably as of late. "Makeine" starts with the template of what I'd call a "Rebound Romance", and it's nice that the questioning period of this genre is reduced. It's not cut short exactly, seeing as it runs over the entirety of the season. It rarely takes the focus for the main couple though, and whenever it does for other characters, it's resolved far more succinctly than it is usually. In a way, it solves a problem that doesn't really need to exist, I don't think in modern times many stories can justify stretching out a romance Fruits Basket style, and even with the relatively reduced standard 12-episode run-time, most stories could probably be told in about 4 standard-length episodes, if there's no outstanding features otherwise. The way "Makeine" approaches is problem is to actually fit those stories into 2-4 episodes and just having fun with the ones in between. Without wanting to make any statements on the writing, they easily circumvent those pacing problem and make watching it much easier.

"Very Important People Season 2" is a continuation of the improv comedy series, and I felt that it was an improvement over the first season. They kept the costumes more vague in comparison to the first run, and overall the guests had to lean into somewhat zanier characters. The haunted doll episode stands out as a personal favorite, I think because the narrative that emerged from it flowed very rapidly.

"Sasaki & Peeps" defies genre, but also adheres to it. It's perhaps spiritually related to "Re:Creators", in that almost all popular genres of the time factor heavily into plot points and aesthetics, and ultimately this gives it an odd sort of charm. It doesn't last terribly long, and perhaps it'd be good that it only had twelve episodes, as the many different plot threads didn't seem to be going anywhere. In a way, this series wrote itself into the exact opposite position as "Makeine" where it tried to adhere to all of the usual genre trappings, but for every genre. I don't mind the writing of experimental series becoming slightly schizophrenic, but it needs to keep its own pace. Case in point would probably be the "Marc" storyline, which feels the most like the standard Isekai plot wherein the protagonist finds a long and convoluted plan to avoid solving a problem with the obvious established methods. That is, to my mind the least interesting part of such series, especially if the premise of the series does not present any interesting challenges.

"Sakamoto Days" works for me, notably in ways that "One Punch Man" didn't. It's perhaps the setting that feels more coherent when the theme isn't all over the place in that way that superhero universes tend to become given enough time, and since the genre has a long history of one-upping itself "because I told you so"-style, "One Punch Man" lost me somewhere in the middle of it's second season. "Sakamoto Days" is the same series, if we're completely honest, just with a different coat of paint. It, too, is probably funnier in the manga. There's a lot of scenes that have somewhat distracting sound effects spliced into the audio, that are meant to indicate the chin-jiggles that the titular character experiences, but since this is an animation, and the director wisely decided against constant slow-motion to emphasis this admittedly not very funny joke, the joke doesn't even register as one, if one doesn't get annoyed by the sound-design. The manga probably has space for some bizarre face-shapes, which could land the joke significantly better. The story is comparable with its spiritual predecessors, which is to say: Nothing to write home about. Still, I was entertained fine, probably in the way that most viewers/readers of One Punch Man were entertained, if they didn't take issue with the setting it's found itself in.

"Zenshu" is one of those anime about anime - at least in a way. It's still the same flavour of heart-warming that such series usually are, especially because the execution is actually quite good. Not only is the animation quite beatiful the art direction distinguishes between elements of the "real" world and the drawn additions in a way that makes sense. Strikingly, it makes drawn scraggles appearing as an object in the world substantive enough to make sense in the moment, which is an indicator good animation direction. Apart from this, the themes of inspiration, artistic collaboration and the types of authorship are conveyed in the many visceral anxieties depicted in the latter scenes. There is something silly about the obsession that drives the process of creating something. It can come from things that aren't great, the artist in question might know they're not great, and list the flaws in loving detail and yet it tends to inspire to greater things. "Zenshu" takes exactly that aspect of the creation process and struggles with the authorship works that are created like that have, when fans of media start creating media.

It's probably clear why I even attempted watching "Reborn as a Vending Machine". It's such a silly premise, and I think these things make great second screen content. It features perhaps one of the worst animation I've seen in a while, with bland character designs. Considering I've been aware of the title for a while, I feel it could have gotten a bigger budget, but since the writing also became kind of lackluster as things went on, I'm guessing this might have been produced out of obligation. Japan of course has a special relationship to vending machines and with titles like these I'm usually most interested in the weird things they can showcase or odd methods to engineer themselves out of a problem. The fact that having the vending machine in question be generic vending machines most of the time sidesteps the interesting part quite effectively. If it had kept to the style of the oxygen vending machine, it might have kept my interested for longer.

"Arcane S2" is a continuation that I'm luke-warm about. I'm guessing it's better when the first season is more present in ones mind, but the depiction of power struggles following a power vacuum makes for a decently compelling story either way. The show is of course beautifully animated and there's several really breath-taking visuals that could easily be a desktop wallpaper. What it loses in comparison to the first season is the feeling of a living world that exists around the storylines we're supposed to follow. Some of this is down to taste, I suppose. The writing is arguably more efficient in this second season than in it was in the first, where not all characters had a real storyline to follow. This time around, each character has a very tight schedule of character development and revelations to check off before it culminates in a grand finale that wraps up most of these stories in an impressively satisfying manner. I'm entirely divorced from League of Legends (multiplayer games in general, actually. The idea makes me tired), so I'm enjoying this series entirely independently of its source material. Still, I'm finding myself ambivalent about the prospect of other Riot Games animation projects, because I suspect my interest will correlate directly with how much the central cast intrigues me.

"Axiom's End" is a book I picked up used, entirely out of curiosity, and because I was familiar with the author's other work. Lindsay Ellis is probably going to be one of those seminal figures in the history of the internet, if we give it time to settle and look past all the terrible billionaire-driven nonsense that we're stuck in at the minute. She's played with similar book concepts to "Axiom's End" earlier on in her career. I recall a series that showcased her developing a paranormal Cthulhu romance or somesuch, which I didn't quite get at the time. It's not the sort of literature I otherwise enjoy, and I found myself skimming through some parts of this book as well, I'm sure it's probably better than I found it, the concept just wasn't for me in the first place. There are two more installments in the series, which I'll likely pass on. If she decides to write another novel outside of the supernatural romance genre though, I'd be more than willing to try, seeing as the prose of the book was not the weakest part for me, a problem I otherwise find in many novels intended for a young-adult or even fantasy-reading audience.

I completed "JoJo's Bizarre Adventure Part 1" in chunks, read on and off over several weeks. 40-odd chapters of manga really aren't too difficult to read, and I'm pretty accustomed to reading manga on my phone as well. It's probably not doing the work in its entirety justice to read it from the very beginning, seeing as most of the context is easily gathered from later installments when the series has found its identity, but I would like to not have to google reading orders, if it can be avoided at all. The first part of this series is almost unrecognizable as the thing it would become in its later, and more acclaimed years. The art is a little wonkier, and the influences feel more akin to "Fist of the North Star", rather than whatever weirdness contemporary volumes pull from. It was a fine read overall, a little tedious at points, and I question the author's decision to lean so heavily on this one single antagonist, rather than pacing things out a bit, but I'll be willing to read further volumes, just to get to the parts that are considered iconic, eventually. I expect it to take a while though, because I'm allergic to hype, which this series radiates like nobody's business.

"Hundreds of Beavers" is a Looney Toons cartoon come to life, but using entirely practical visuals. Every animal is a guy (I suspect the same guy) in a costume, the minute there's more than two or three of them on screen, the crowd in composited in the charming low-fi style of early movies, and not a single word is spoken. Sung, sure, but not spoken. It's only technically a musical, I promise. It's not terribly profound, but I love it all the same, for the love of film-making that is on display here. It feels like a labour of love for cinema and animation, and I think this might be one of those movies I could play on loop.

Most things I could say about "Invincible Season 1" have been said by other people before me. It's an engaging story told using the tropes and inversions of the comic superheroes. I'm not too well versed in the history of comic books, so I don't know whether the idea of an "evil superman" was already played out by the way the source material came around. I imagine so, it's perhaps one of the first ideas one might think of, when the sincerely of such a figure has worn off. The hype around Invincible seems to have died down, even as it's still ongoing, which somewhat allows me to enjoy it more than had I started on it earlier. It does seem like the first Season exists mostly as a setup for a more interesting story. The underworld seems to continue on its own story, while the overarching conflict between the protagonist and their father looms large, after the explosions of violence that Omniman's appearances have now started to exhibit regularly. I'm guessing that the next two seasons at least will have enough material to keep me interested, especially if they can balance some of the plots going on well against said overarching story.

"Cherry Magic" is the kind of tame that only things meant for TV broadcast can be these days. It's a cute story, surprisingly explicit at times (and I'm not entirely sure whether I really like that for this), and it affords all of its characters a lot of grace. It's a fairly regular feel-good romance, if it weren't for the BL aspect of it, which I imagine is meant to be its main selling point. I found myself watching it with half an eye for most of its runtime. Slowly, there are more BL and GL shows released in anime. I'm not sure why, but more released Yuri shows have settings offering something beyond the romance aspect. I'm hoping the BL department can catch up on that. What "Cherry Magic" does offer is that it's explicit in its same-sex romance, something few Yuri shows have managed to do. I remember it being a big deal that a Yuri protagonist explicitly described herself as gay. "Cherry Magic" includes a tasteful sex scene. If this is where we need to start to embrace romance and interpersonal relationships in a more adult and authentic way, sign me up.

"Lisa Frankenstein" could be a cult classic in the making, maybe in the same spirit as "The Cabin in the Woods", though for 80s teen movies and monster romances. It features many updates to the genre-specific tropes that I personally enjoy, mostly because I don't really have the nostalgia for the movies this is homaging, and find their tropes exhausting. The protagonist's father has remarried after the traumatic murder of her mother, and while her new stepmother genuinely dislikes her, her adoptive sister, while a little self-centered and proudly not too bright, is trying to support her in her own way. She makes her mistakes, one ultimately very traumatic for her as well, but even in the end, their relationship remains intact, in an odd, kind of intangible way, if only due to the circumstances of the final scenes. Even though I don't have the nostalgia for it, I really like the resurgence of genre fiction, even driven by small studios and creators from the independent sphere. It gives me the chance to develop said missing nostalgia on my own, somewhat by proxy, but seeing as most of them have their second, third or fourth chances to reconcile with their shortcomings and adapt to modern audiences, I expect fun things at least, if not great ones.

"Make Something Up" is a collection of short stories, that feels like a book collage, if you've read other stories by Chuck Palahniuk. It's very relieving to see great writers recycle ideas between formats. It's like getting a brief glance at their development process. I've found snippets of "Fight Club" and "Invisible Monsters" in there, and I'm sure had I read more of his work, I would have found those too. I also think I can see him experimenting and developing his style. It's mostly fixed at the point where those short stories were finalized, I guess, but his quirks are more glaring occasionally. I think it's okay to describe them this way, they feel designed that way on purpose. It also makes me feel vindicated for writing short stories for a very similar purpose.

"Ameku M.D." is the kind of show I have a particular weakness for, that is detective shows pretending that they're some other kind of other show. In this case, it's a medical drama. In a way, the two genres are already very closely related. Most medical dramas will approach the topic of an episode as a detective story. Having this group of medical professionals deal directly with murder cases makes things a little easier to grasp in my opinion. I don't have a cache of medical jargon ready to make accurate predictions, but having seen the series, I feel smart being able to make a vague guess at the nature of medical failure on screen. I did find the first of the two larger cases to be a little drab, though that might have been due to the repeating teaser of the mystery for the length of its runtime. The evolution of more personally involved cases and complex, cases within cases are quite well done though, so the format is at least future-proof. It's unfortunately not a very strong character showcase, but empirically, those are the easier aspects of a show to fix.

"The Silt Verses" has absolutely amazing world building. Not many podcasts will make it into this format, mostly because they have the tendency to not end, this however, felt like a limited series with three seasons that ended very definitively. Not everything is resolved from a plot perspective, but it feels like the end of the line for the cast. I can only recommend giving this a listen for people who like urban horror fantasy settings and character dramas. The production value is also nothing to scoff at, often feeling like movie foaly, and dispensing with the narrator that might recap the grander, difficult to vocalize scenes.

"Welcome Home Franklin" I watched mostly because I have a long-standing love of the Peanuts that I'm sure I won't shake with time. It's also nice to see the gang animated in the classic 2D style again. The previous 3D iteration was also fine, but I never quite got used to it. I'm vaguely aware of the progressive step that Franklin's inclusion in the gang was at the time, but I've never managed to track down those volumes of the comic, mostly because I heavily favour the dogs, and sometimes struggle to keep up with all the shenanigans that the rest of the cast are up to. As an animated show, I prefer the kids, mostly because they can form words, and I don't always have the energy for the "Hundreds of Beavers" treatment.

"Invincible: Atom Eve" is a standard spin-off treatment of a side character that will take up a larger part in upcoming segments of a story. It's at least interesting to watch a different kind of person go through a similar process as the principal protagonist went through, and I always liked how the specific way that people came up is bound into their civilian identity, so if the world building is solid and non-standard, I'm open to knowing a couple of backstories.

I did not expect to finish "Manufacturing Consent", as quickly as I did once I committed to reading it during a relatively busy three-week vacation, partially because I did not catch that in true Leftwing Lit fashion, about a third of my copy was Appendices and Sources, and partially because trying to parse Chomsky's dense run-on sentences consisting mostly of words I would have thesaurus'd in order to include them in any of my own sentences on the slim screen of a Sony Xperia 10 III is as reliable a way as any to tire oneself out on screen-time. However, once it got going, which it did around the part it tackled the media treatment of the South American Sandinista elections, I found it engaging enough to power through with increasing speed. It was recommended to me as one of the essential works to build an understanding around media and propaganda, and it does not make the mistake (which I have done) to attempt to fix the inherent entanglement of the two. Instead, its proposed propaganda model, I believe, will prove a useful tool to just about anyone when trying to check contemporary reporting of complicated issues, even before vetting sources on their own, which is frankly an unreasonable ask for a working population under capitalism anyway.

I picked up "Our Architecture" by Tajuddin Rasdi in a Kinokuniya while on vacation, where I my little designer-enthusiast heart was joyously overwhelmed to discover a design section that took up about half a floor. While this has started me on a journey to find a similar store in the city I live, so far without any luck, the books I took from there also gave me some minor insight into contemporary Malayan culture by way of architecture. The author seems to me, upon cursory online-searches, one of these intellectuals, who have graduated from an expert in one field into interdisciplinary cultural-political speaker. He is, however, a Doctor of Islamic Architecture, which means that at least in this, his understanding of the matter is greater than mine. While he doesn't state this directly in any of the essays featuring in this brief collection, there seems to be a lacking sense of cultural identity in designing space. The author underlines this lack as a characteristically Malayan problem, though I suspect this might be a generally non-American problem. At the same time, the solution of this problem doesn't seem to be "merely" preservation of traditional buildings and spaces, as this is the approach chosen by many central- and western European countries. Perhaps he sees the particular trappings of that approach as incompatible with the progress of rapidly developing nations. He instead advocates for mindful inclusion of the traditional solutions to architectural and spatial design problems, which will "automatically" retain some distinct aesthetic identity.

Where "Our Architecture" I bought, because it was light and small, "Librorum Ridiculorum" was just kinda weird. Reading it is a very different experience from reading theory of any kind, and it never meant to. It showcases some odd books along with the notes used to categorize them. It's light entertainment, and I can imagine the kind of person who will make it part of their mission to track down one or two of those titles out of morbid curiosity. I think the way it's structured, invites viewing this book as a catalogue, and as someone who was never too sure about whether they liked books like the Guiness Book of World Records, the appeal is somewhat lost on me, though I'm unsure whether more information on the books featured would help its case in a measureable capacity.

2025, Q1 - A Look Back at Warrior

I started watching things again, and while I don't feel like writing full essays on everything I watch - why will become clear as this goes on - I feel I should at least try to put my thoughts about them into words. My watching habits are perhaps a little unhealthy. I like having something playing on the side when I think, or when I don't. I'm not huge on playing Video Games either, so the things I do play are just as well playable without BGM. I know: the shame. This means that me watching something is not as much an expression of even a passing interest, as much as an acknowledgment that it exists. This will make up a lot of the Anime especially that will show up here, as 20-minute episodes happen to fit nicely into my daily routine of running from one task to the next. So without further ado, let's begin with what I watched in January.

"Ride the Cyclone" is a Cats-style indie-musical with a morbid bend and better production design than it has any business having. It's also got a lot of very catchy tunes. It's format - largely consisting of a series of Character songs - lends itself for very sleek direction, as it cuts around the fat with brief snippets of dialogue. I have a weakness for "dark circus music", so when I saw a YouTube documentary on this show by the ever-excellent "Wait In The Wings", I felt the need to track it down.

Even though, for pragmatic and planning reasons, I didn't feel like tracking down the soundtrack and I had only seen this once, I can still recall almost all the hooklines of the songs, which I think is a great indicator about their memorability. Narratively, it's also decently engaging despite its simplicity, and in high contrast to Cats, not openly nonsensical and without frankly cringeworthy source-material.

The mystery girl's lament is clearly designed to be a standout number, and as someone with the aforementioned "creepy circus" sensibilities, it's of course one of my favorite numbers, especially when combined with the haunting stage-work. A lot of that is especially in combination with the simple stage design, that allows very effective utilization of lack of light and empty space especially.

There have been so many TV series that were arguably mistreated, and I think it's safe to say, that Warrior is one of them. The first two seasons had set a very high bar for me, and though much of the content is perhaps minorly triggering to me, as a person with very few triggers, it addresses these topics with a tact that I don't usually see nor expect from media. The show setting in the US during its westward expansion, but focused in large parts in working class communities - opposing ones at that - is a rare perspective. It showcases solid political theory through its plot, and less through the vocabulary, and perhaps even on accident, specifically, worker solidarity (or rather the need for it) and intersectionality, the latter mostly in its treatment of its female characters. All that came as a surprise to me though, because I originally gave it a watch because of the action in the show, which has held a consistent standard into the third season. Someone with an appreciation for martial arts choreographies in movies is probably very easily impressed these days, seeing as most stuntwork in fight choreographies are somewhat lacking, so we're often stuck with what we can get, but especially for a streaming series, this is very much above par. The third season doesn't really see the protagonist Ah Sam in a duel like the previous two did (or at least not with a fighter of comparable ability), which I do miss in the season, but there were plenty fun action scenes nonetheless. I could probably write a full essay about the series, and perhaps even this last season, if I really tried, but since that's not what this is for, I'd like to just address the ending of the season, and with it, the series, as it's been axed somewhat unceremoniously. It fits neatly into the pattern the previous seasons had established, with all protagonists at the bottom of some crisis, larger than the last one. Of course, this being the ending of the story officially makes it a little more devastating than in the previous two cases, but it left off at an interesting place. I would have really liked to see a fourth season wrap up, considering it would have likely meant two new Tongs trying to rise to power while Chinatown was being squeezed by the US institutions with either propagandistic or labour interests, and this kind of faction-driven conflict appeals to me very strongly.

I've taken careful interest in Dropout content, ever since I saw the first season of Dimension 20 on my favourite YouTube derivative last year. That's why I watched the first season of Vic Michaelis' "Very Important People". I don't have any special love for improv comedy, though it's an art-form I very much enjoy when I notice how good the people involved are. Since the improv scene is somewhat difficult to access where I live (as in, I don't have the time to keep checking where things are happening, and then likely won't have the means to get home in time), my first real exposure to this form of comedy was the "Middleditch and Schwartz" Netflix series, great fun in its own right. I don't think "Very Important People" is quite at that level, but the follow-through is still at least middlingly entertaining most of the time. Part of it is that the costumes are sometimes too weird for my taste, and that the characters that are developed won't always lean into a style of humour I enjoy. When it works though, it works amazingly. I think Ally Beardsley's character is the right amount of weird and self-consistent for me to like in this sort of format, but then again their costume didn't immediately make it apparent what they were supposed to play. The short runtime of each episode definitely plays to the strength of the series, and so does Michaelis' delivery in the style of somebody just barely holding it together, which they also bring to other shows, like Game Changer. The runtime also makes the prospect of another season at least interesting to me, since the concept itself is interesting, and I'm sure the execution can only improve, now that they've probably had feedback on what the audience enjoyed the most.

"Poets of the Chinese Revolution" is decidedly not the type of book I usually read. Despite my weekly endeavor to put together something resembling a poem, it's not actually an art form that appeals to me in any significant way. Or perhaps I only understand the artistic appeal when the poem is performed. Perhaps it's like sheet music. I find the ability of spoken word musicians to come up with a verse on the spot genuinely impressive, for example, but I cringe every time I hear inverted syntax. As such, reading a commented poetry collection should seem a little out of step with my usual tastes. Truth be told, the attempt stems from the curiosity about art in socialist states, which is usually overtly coded as propaganda or counter-propaganda, rather than art for its own sake. Much of the commentary did highlight this relation of art to the revolutionary project, especially on its chapter on Mao. The poems themselves of course, are in Chinese, meaning I had to make do with the translation. Translating poetry seems like a thankless job to me. It immediately loses its form and with it, a lot of the subtextual construction, and the translator will have to strike a balance between preserving intent and creating a legible text. I certainly couldn't do it, let alone make the attempt between languages so different in form as Cantonese and English. I don't think I really learned anything about poetry reading the book, but I came across a couple of new forms of poetry, and got a sense about the ubiquity poetry held in that particular stretch of history.

"No Longer Allowed in Another World" was kind of a disappointment. I'm not sure why I would expect anything from a comedy Isekai, but something about centering a character clearly inspired by Dazai Osamu felt like it could be at least funny or even interesting. Isekai is not a genre I enjoy generally enjoy, but I still see a decent number of those shows in a year, since now and then there's art styles that really work for me, or there might be a concept fun enough to give he thing a spin. Since this is decidedly second-screen content, I usually finish a season, but will have to think on whether to pick up a second season, should it come around. I had read Dazai's seminal "No Longer Human", which besides its depressing content, I thought was a decent look at passivity. It is likely the one work that characterizes Dazai in popular culture today, so the morbidity of the character is often centered in these depictions. It makes figures inspired by Dazai a short-hand for the tortured artist, reflected through a specific cultural lens, which has been historically the more popular way to go about things in Japanese media. "No Longer Allowed in Another World" is very average apart from its protagonist though. Perhaps the best I can say for the series is, that its protagonist is not annoying to me, which is partially because he spends a significant time of the series being generally absent or detached from the events. It's mostly played for laughs, but the space it leaves is not utilized well. The world building and supporting cast are too boilerplate to capture attention for any amount of time, so all in all, the series delivers a whole lot of nothing.

Frank Herbert's "Dune" has so far escaped my reading on prestige. I'm not always in the mood for good, or even great things, and this seemed at the time like the only book in my collection I hadn't read. I would find a small stack a couple of weeks later, but by that time, I had been thoroughly absorbed into the story. It certainly makes a good case for its status as legendary science fiction, though I wouldn't mark the prose as notable as much as the subject matter. Dune reads to me primarily as a story about colonialism. Even if the plot might not center it directly, every facet of it is mired in the colonial relations between the Empire and the Fremen. Where it sets itself apart from the problematic white savior narratives notoriously pervasive in the pre-2000s, is the way it highlights the distance and co-reliance of Paul Atreides as he lives among the Fremen. It also does not shy away from depicting Paul's co-option of the Fremen faith and people to ultimately his own ends as a tyrannical act. This first novel then ends on a bitter note, as Paul cements his power in a system the only way it permits it, through the means of traditionalist hierarchy and oppression. Starkly in contrast to the way the Fremen seem to handle things among them, I might add. I found a version of the book that's fairly new and features simple cell-shaded art, so I think I might look for exactly this publication series if I want to look for any potential sequels.

"Bye Bye Earth" was mostly fine. It was perhaps a little bit mangled by jarring jumps in the timeline between episodes. As far as light novel plots go, it doesn't feel like anything special, in that it ranks just above Isekai in complexity, and while the aesthetics that Lidenfilms studio has chosen are perfectly fine, and at least consistent, it doesn't add any additional coherence to the specifics of the settings. I think in many cases, this should be the primary task for adaptation, especially in cases like this, where the world isn't just generic template fantasy. I can only imagine, that the light novel author neglected many visual descriptions, which I think is perfectly fine for the medium. Otherwise, the odd focus on both swords as a kind of "combat soul", and the approach to equate large-scale battles with orchestra performances might have given the visual design of the show more concrete pointers. The character work might have been reserved for a planned second season, seeing as much of the main cast is not especially noteworthy and experiences very standard development throughout the 10-episode run of the show, and those aforementioned time-jumps do absolutely terrible things for the character development of the secondary cast. An aspect I find very interesting though is the way the series handles Mermaids as creatures that reflect the desires of a chosen one. It makes them into automatically co-dependent creatures, but also able to change appearance and genders on a whim. It's not really comparable to any gender expression that exists out in the real world, and what this means is occasionally explored when the point of view of a Mermaid is taken on, usually for flashback purposes, but this externality feels like an interesting and notable one, and, in my opinion, calls for a Mermaid-focused spin-off.

I had started "Rokka no Yuusha" the previous year, because it had a really slow start, and I couldn't stand most of the characters. The visual design I found interesting enough though, to sit through it while doing something else. Sadly, the story proved it could be interesting just as the season ended. What started as a very standard Fantasy plot quickly evolved into what I can only describe as a "battle mystery" in which people who aren't entirely aware of each others' abilities and amount of knowledge try to sus out an impostor among them. In my mind, this series exists as a 12-episode proof of concept that would have become really good, once a second round kicked off, since now the rules for the mystery have been established. In general, mystery stories set in fantasy settings suffer heavily from the unclear-rules-problem in which it's not immediately apparent which features of the world can be included in the solutions of the mystery. It's different for other series like "Classroom of the Elite" where we know we can expect physics to work more or less as expected. As such, the sudden inclusion of thermodynamics felt a little out of pocket. Still, it would have set an interesting precedent, and subsequent arcs might have felt like longer versions of Danganronpa mysteries. It's greatest weakness might be its characters though, which make it genuinely difficult to care, which one might not make it, or be the impostor, doubly so, because the point-of-view character is one that I would have little issue with never seeing (and especially hearing) again.

Much has been said about "Look Back" already, by people more involved in the interesting this story exists within, but I still had a good time watching it. I of course was exposed to Fujimoto's work primarily by "Chainsaw Man", and hence I wasn't as surprised as I could have been by the turn this movie took at about the half-way point. That part didn't resonate as strongly with me though as the meditation on art, talent and most importantly validation that it presented in the first half. The second half feels very reminiscent of real-world events involving Kyoto Animation, which is the most jarring to someone aware of even just the outlines, and even the bittersweet ending didn't quite manage to take me back.

I especially like the way this movie works with sound and music. The dramatic and emotional scenes in the latter half are often almost entirely without music and minimal foley, which gives the scene time to breathe, especially when very little is happening. The scratchy, loose art style also does a lot to ground it, setting it apart from the usual smooth aesthetics that characterizes many anime and makes it otherwise easy enough to parse visually so that more interesting motions don't confuse the viewer. The visual stylings of the in-story manga "Shark Kick" is close enough to "Chainsaw Man" that I can't help but read the protagonist as an author-insert, which gives the story a lot more weight in context, which I'll have trouble ignoring. I'm not much or "Death of the Author" anyways, but I understand that just because I support and identify with Fujimoto's whole deal where he's a weird little art-freak winging it, and secretly hoping he's doing okay, doesn't make the movie better than it is. In terms of translating a manga though, I think this is a really good example in choosing how to translate scenes. This, too, could probably have an essay to itself, but I'll leave this as a strong recommendation and move on.

The "Mononoke" movie is absolutely gorgeous. I unfortunately don't have a copy of the series lying around, but I have to assume, the series matches the movie in its visuals. It's bumped the series up on my proverbial to-watch list, even though it being in a language I'm not fluent in will have it require my full attention. The story, I'm not too sure about though, admittedly, though I'm used to Anime movies being more like promotional material for the source material. In the case of Mononoke, this is perhaps a little complicated, seeing as it's a spin-off that's not immediately inferrable from the title, even if one speaks Japanese. There are Manga, which I'm assuming are also a spin-off, but having seen the movie, I think the animation is a very real draw, which I'm assuming will show up in form of perhaps a peculiar art style in the manga. I'm personally more easily wooed by good animation than I am by good art on a page, but that is just personal preference, and likely overexposure to A1-Animation.

I was initially torn on Dimension 20's "Never Stop Blowing Up" season. As far as actual play shows go, I think it's one of the better ones, because the story-telling is very tight and streamlined, but some of their concepts just fail to catch my attention. I usually give it two episodes or so, and decide whether I like the cast and direction of the story enough to continue. This "Never Stop Blowing Up" season utilizes the system of the same name, which seems relatively new on the scene, and geared heavily toward the action-movie feel of the early 90s. I personally don't have a nostalgia for those movies, but I still find myself with moderate interest. I find it difficult to articulate what I like about Dimension 20 in particular when it comes to actual play shows beyond the very vague, and this holds true for this season. It's probably mostly the interplay between cast members and GM, none of which approach the game with the intention to "win". Whether I like a season or not then is mostly a question of whether I like how the people in the cast interface with the setting, or whether I can get into the setting enough. I don't feel like it's a good metric, but since each episode of this show tends toward 2 hours, I reserve the right to drop things that don't entertain me enough.

This season though, very much plays to the strengths of this format, and perhaps the entirety of this show. Like most other seasons I really like it lays out the internal conflicts of the characters very early, almost entirely in the first episode, and covers the straightforward paths to resolving them with so much over the top fluff and action that you don't notice how easy the story is.

I had read a good portion of the "Dandadan" manga before, so I knew what I was in for, when I started the anime. The only reason I hadn't read further is because I've not been reading manga, in lieu of the books I have piling up on my living room table. I never really know up to which point an adaptation goes before I've finished it, but judging by previous experiences in this way, I was pretty sure it wasn't going to include stuff beyond the part I hadn't read. Still, sometimes you can tell from the opening that the animation that's coming is going to be really great. As an action series, of course those scenes are going to get the lion's share of amazing animation, but what I was very pleasantly surprised by was the fact that the humour given voice hits better for me than it did in the manga, just through timing and delivery. In exchange, it kind of loses the more honest emotional scenes, which were few and far between anyway. "Dandadan" is mostly a comedy and action series, and I didn't really come for the emotion anyway, so that's more than fine. Where the manga sets out to write interesting things, it does so competently, seeing as the main cast are at this point still unsure of how their powers work and whether there might be rules to the battle. Emblematic for this is perhaps the giant sumo-alien that they try to defeat by having it touch the ground with its hand, which would be a losing condition in the sport that alien is modelled after. I also appreciate, that that doesn't even remotely work, because there's really no reason why it would. At the same time, much of the show is based in the culture of urban legends to make the paranormal side just as ill-defined as the alien side of the premise. All in all, I'd be glad to see a second season of this, and when I get back to read manga, I'll likely try to catch up with this one.

"Bartender" is a show of the type to mythologize a profession. I have a particular weakness for shows that highlight passions for professions that tend to get overlooked for the flashier, more prominent ones. The visual design of this show is not too interesting, but as a person who sticks to longdrinks and cocktails when out on the town, I found some really interesting drinks in there. It's otherwise an easy and cozy watch, I wouldn't mind more of, if only because of the subject matter and my own passing interest in it.

I struggle to call "Beau is Afraid" a comedy. I could only ever pitch it as a comedy, centering a deeply tragic protagonist, whom I never learned to sympathized with. That might well be intentional, if the final scene of the movie is meant to literalize its thesis, but I don't think it's quite as simple. It's a very long movie, and at times I could really feel that length. The clearest example of this is an extended theater scene, that I found very tedious to get through, because the point of the scene was very clearly telegraphed, and I don't too much enjoy the type of theater that was performed. It seemed very "american high school play put on with one dress rehearsal and too little ambition". Beyond this, the movie comes with its own silent world-building. The title is apt for most of the movie, but the world he inhabits is very openly hostile, and not just toward him. There is of course "the scene" toward the end of the film, and I admire that this could refer to several scenes. More specifically, I'm thinking of one that required some effects work and pushed the movie firmly into surreality, including imagery I'm probably not going to forget for a long while. I think the movie might benefit from some editing, but I still ended up liking it. It's not necessarily one to watch with company though.

"Code Geass - Roze of the Recapture" is one of the myriad Code Geass follow-ups that we're apparently now getting every other year. I hold the original in very high regard, even though its flaws are often very abundantly clear, and it's very much of its time. Still, subsequent installments of the series have never quite hit the same note for me that the original had, perhaps because the story implications aren't as heavy as they are in the original. This backdrop has returned in Roze of the Recapture, returning the setting to the pre-original status quo. It makes the conflict more tangible than those of other installments. I take some issue with it, because from a story-telling perspective, we've seen the downfall of an empire led by an uprising in one of its conclaves once before, and this could easily be a relevant part of this world's history, if only we could have seen how the empire reconstituted and what roles the established institutions - even the ones that were once the heroes of the story - either failed or contributed to this rebuilding of the empire. As it is, this is just Code Geass, but with effectively four characters, and fewer politics. Good enough to kill some time, because it's still one of the few shows that consistently makes mech-battles snappy and readable enough to be fun.

"House of Leaves" was a recommendation for non-ergodic literature, and it's certainly the most non-ergodic that I've read so far. It got easier to read further down the line though, as soon as I understood who was who and which set of footnote was written from whose perspective. Perhaps it's me being used to reading books with page-long footnotes. Once the formatting of the book started getting fully wild was also incidentally when the story started getting interesting to me. The accounts of the expeditions into the house were great suspense writing, and a welcome reprieve of what had been descriptions of relatively mundane events so far. The Navidson records are by far the most intriguing, and also have the most interesting additions in the appendix of the book - roughly 150 pages of first hand accounts, photographic material and sketches. At the other extreme, the pages inserted by Jonny are really just repetitive erotica with an undertone of depression, which is fine, but not my thing when it goes on for more than two pages at a time. It is, all in all, a simulation of a living document that is actively worked on and elaborated upon by parties of different dispositions toward the topic, and since the events centered in the story are technically of supernatural nature, the academic discussion that happen beyond the pages included in the book leak into the footnotes and appendices primarily. It's an interesting read, and perhaps at another time I'll look into more non-ergodic literature. I've heard 'S' might be up my alley.

"The Elusive Samurai" I remember being discussed with some division when it came out, even though I don't really understand why. On a visceral level, there might be a tonal imbalance, though I think that's just something one might want to expect given the subject matter. These kinds of tone shift have always been a strength of animation, in my opinion. Besides the sudden tone shifts that crop up every now and then, I think this series had a really good run, a worthwhile story, and characters that got decent development and were often entertaining enough even without it. I have enjoyed shows of this type in the past, namely the Arslan series that ended up petering out in a very unspectacular fashion, and I'm not opposed to watching someone attempt this kind of show again.

"Metallic Rouge" is one in a long line of entries that I wish were better. Original anime are a rare occurrence in general. Most anime are meant primarily as promotional material for the manga, and in many cases, the precedent is sensible. It's where the concept of filler arcs comes from. Most episodes of an anime condense five or more chapters, and actively airing shows will quickly catch up to the source material, especially since weekly releases are far from guaranteed for manga in the first place, which will puts the team and network before the decision to either introduce filler, or write an original ending. Neither is usually a popular decision. Original anime comes with none of that baggage. In theory, one could know exactly how many episodes were required to tell the story on wanted to tell, but in practice, it's always abundantly clear that the regular 12 episode run that those projects get are far from enough to scratch the world building. The story probably wouldn't have been great, even if it had gotten more time to develop, and what the show had time to establish in terms of world building felt weak either way. Every time I see an original project with some decent animation though, I hope it'll turn out better.

The fact that "Naked Lunch" even made it into my viewing list perhaps characterizes my interests in movies very clearly. In truth, I'm a little torn about whether I like this movie or not. It seems to play with many different concepts, and doesn't really care to connect them too much beyond the vague subversion of some spy thriller. The genre itself is a little bit fraught, considering the most enduring franchise has been through a lot of rough patches and is still arguably the blueprint for newcomers to the scene. Naked Lunch is of course a little older than the modern spy thriller and so could make a case for having foreseen the genre stagnating. This aspect of the movie is mostly aesthetics though. While it does seem at the end to be reflecting the actual events that transpire in the story, the entire plot seems to be a cyclical depiction of a particular artistic process, fitting the trope of the suffering artist, complete with challenges to the sexual identity of a staunchly heteronormative ideologue, substance abuse problems and a "muse", which in the way they show up in most spy media, turns out to be replaceable by the point the process is completed, fridged to kick off the process in the first place. Movies about art are frequently at risk of being navel-gazey enough to turn me off, but when they work, they really work. "Naked Lunch" managed to hook me enough to make Cronenberg's effects work a part of a difficult narrative, rather than the center-piece, the way I expected it to become, so I'm very much inclined to recommend at least one watch.

"A Place Promised in Our Early Days" is Makoto Shinkai's directorial debut from all the way back in 2004. It stands in significant contrast to his more well-known works "Your Name" and "A Silent Voice" both of which I liked fine. "A Place Promised in Our Early Days" though, I felt fell flat in all the ways that his more acclaimed titles have managed to avoid. It's interesting to see all the pieces in a movie that would one day produce the highest-grossing anime movie internationally (at least until it was dethroned by a Demon-Slayer sequel, disappointingly), but the slice-of-life component was just decidedly too high in this one. Not that it busied itself with the usual trappings of the genre, it's really just a feeling that I get when I see anime adopt a certain tone. I think Shinkai's stories work best with a minimal amount of magical realism, and the setting of this film adds very little to the ideas in the story, and the other way round.

"Quality Assurance in Another World" is another Isekai, which means I only watched it because I worked from home that day and didn't want to do the sensory-deprivation thing. The Isekai gimmick this time saw a QA-Tester trapped in the game they were meant to be debugging. It's very much a setup that can be interesting, depending on the execution. It was, for all it's worth, good execution. Video games and their bugs - even post-release - are a frequent source of natural comedy. Entire YouTube careers have been built on this. This show understands this and plays with the bugs as sources of comedy, in a cultural, memetic way, and in a natural way, as well as solutions to problems that the protagonists would not be able to deal with otherwise. Though it's generally difficult for me to find my enthusiasm for Isekai these days, I wouldn't mind another season of this.

"The Penguin" is one in the line of gangster serials that managed to capture my attention. Generally, the genre and its aesthetics, as well as its story conventions have always been interesting to me, and as such it's not exactly surprising I liked this series, that was perhaps even an archetypical mob movie stretched over the span of eight episodes of pretty solid TV. At this point, my own stance on unions and locally organized structures contrasted against state institutions and especially those organizations that have grown too large to retain their beneficial functions, might slot in neatly with many of the classic plot beats and even rhetorical flourishes that gangsters have a history of using. If "The Penguin" had a theme, I'd say it was about soft power. The first sequence of the series somewhat states this as a thesis, even though it follows up that aspiration with a pretty definitive display of hard power, and immediately acknowledges that this was probably a mistake. The characters especially that are trying to claw their way to the top will do so using primarily soft power, and when they begin relying on their numbers or guns, they regularly lose control over their operation, or even the narrative. This version of the Penguin is perhaps characterized first and foremost by his solitude. His allies are the underdogs of the territories, when he works with the big players, they view him primarily as a pawn, or an unfortunate bed-fellow at best. What grants him his empire at the end of the series is a coordinated use of soft power, built in the background, and leveraged not by him, but in his name. I feel this concludes the story pretty well, but though I'm not entirely convinced the owners of the DC comics IP won't try to weave it back into future projects of theirs eventually.

"The Night Circus" has been on my reading list for a long while. It falls into the category of adult fiction that I find somewhat difficult to read, because to my mind it needed a brief moment to establish its characters in the occasionally very brief chapters, which makes them blend together into horrible amalgams. If I were better with names, perhaps this would have been less of a problem. Once this was sorted though, it told an interesting pastiche of self-actualization stories for people whose mentor figures all seem as unreliable and prone to mood-swings as the setting of a magical circus itself. The prose kept some distance from the inner lives of the characters that made me feel like more of a bystander, but I thought that was appropriate at the least. It gives effect to the moments in which the intense emotions of the characters are externalized through action.

"Nexus" gave me a lot of Gell-Mann whiplash. As a now frequent reader of non-fiction, one should think I would grow used to the authors of books getting details slightly wrong in ways that probably don't matter to the argument, but the entire experience of reading this book made me wish there was a version without the examples. I'm aware the examples are what make about a quarter of books of this style, especially if it's not one of those books that work with diagrams of simulations or even the actual model implementation of a scientific thesis, but the amount that newspaper columns for example were sourced landed somewhere between distracting and aggravating, especially if there are peer-reviewed publications on those same topics widely sourced in other works. Far be it from me to assume any ill intent - in fact, I'm sure the author referenced material they were already familiar with at the time of writing, which is a testament to either great archiving skills or an outstanding memory on their part. In general, the attempt to analyse system failings as requiring changes in a system is refreshing from a liberal standpoint, which might otherwise have suggested to replace bad actors with better actors, but a lot of the analysis falls short in the "why" category. In general I would even fall in line with the criticisms the author levels against large centralized information systems. They advocate for open and transparent information systems with the option to block decisions made on solely on the dataset available within it, which I find is perhaps the only ethical way forward, seeing as we have a proven racial bias in all so far published AI models, for example, and the option to take away the tech-bros' shiny new toy until they've proven they know they won't primarily use it to kill people seems next to impossible. It makes me curious to find a book with equivalent topic selection with a more concise and focused approach though, as I suspect that it might be less painful for me to read.

"The End of Policing" should be required reading for police- and prison-abolitionists. While works by Angela Y. Davis might perhaps build a complete philosophical framework to support their thesis, this book has the great strength of being constructed like a reference book. It tackles ten of the most common uses cited for the necessity of police and deconstructs them using empirical data and small didactic thought exercises in the span of perhaps 20 pages. This makes it an easy start to prepare or refresh for a specific facet of how and why the concept of policing might be entirely outmoded at this stage of civilization. I see myself returning to this book for this purpose a lot in the future.

"Say Nothing" was a stark reminder that I don't understand the Irish liberation struggle. It follows primarily two sisters who join the armed struggle under the IRA in occupied north Ireland. The way the story is told is very interesting to me, because of the elements that seem like they clash in thesis. The framing device for the story is an interview project recording retellings of IRA operations from members that would otherwise take those secrets to the grave. This framing device keeps reminding the viewer that apparently the IRA was primarily lies and skulduggery, but the entire series begins with a nod toward the necessity of armed struggle. I'm not sure what the story is actually advocating then, seeing as peaceful protest was correctly depicted as largely inconsequential to legislature, as well as associated with significant personal risk, and if it denounces the IRA for harming primarily civilians of their own community, that leaves the correct path of action the one where they plant car bombs in London. While I don't necessarily disagree with this, I'm not sure this was intentional.

Then there is the matter of the reformation of the IRA into what is the modern political Sinn Feinn party. The series depicts this as a betrayal to the cause, which I'm not prepared to speak on, as this is a stretch of history I'm not familiar with, but speaking from past struggles of similar character, having a political vanguard for the civilians who are either unable or unwilling to participate in the armed struggle is a key tool to minimize civilian casualties. The devil is in the details however, and there are very likely things that should have been handled differently. Perhaps the series will stand in a different light, when I've read up on my homework first.

"Limits To Growth" is probably the closest one can get to reading an educational textbook without committing to it. It's structured not unlike a simulation paper, which I happen to read semi-regularly, so I'm used to looking at graphs between paragraphs. The topic of applied climate science I'm not directly familiar with, but having been audience to a talk of someone who worked on a very similar project as they one underlying this book's analysis, the methodology at least seems familiar and, nore importantly, easily communicable. It outlines nicely the science around climate change, and the politics recommended to slow or even reverse it, placing it in the long line of scientific findings that technically provides the data and reasoning to set the correct goals and make actionable legislation pitches, but goes ignored by the decision makers.

It is, admittedly, a dry read. It features many bullet point lists, and even more diagrams, which also aren't ordered in a way that makes it very easy to find them again to reference them, so the reader who enjoys it for its literary merits will likely have specific tastes that don't entirely overlap with mine.