New Year, New Animanga
By the luck of the gods, I’ve returned to my post on the same day and I’m not terribly fatigued.
The Year of Cordis Die, the Year of the Snake, the Year CoD S[gunshots]t It’s Respect Out is out, and the Year of the Horse, the Uma 「馬」is in.
I don’t consume Umamusume anything, but it makes the rounds in my favorite spaces, so I can’t ignore it if I wanted to.
Read More »Holiday wrap up
Hope everyone is enjoying their holidays, to include Boxing Day for my British and Commonwealth subscribers, I know you pop in a couple times a month. I am currently on leave right now, seeing family in New York until January 2, so the first post for 2026 will be delayed most likely until later the next day. So this Boxing Day will be spent reflecting on pieces of entertainment that I consumed in 2025, even if it was older or not necessarily released this year.
I won’t be using any particular order or any kind of ranking system. This post is gonna be a free-for-all, so look forward to video games, TV series, movies, and animanga all in one post. For the video game front, the FPS genre suffered a devastating loss earlier this week with one of the founders of Call of Duty and Medal of Honor, Vince Zampella, losing his life in a car crash in Los Angeles. His work, along with that of Jason West, heavily influenced the trajectory of the FPS genre and the gaming landscape from spearheading the modern warfare concept up until he and West were unceremoniously booted on trumped up charges. Nevertheless, neither man was deterred and got back on their feet with the likes of Titanfall under EA.
1970-2025
Read More »Cha-la! Head Cha-la!
Last week, I gave an update on the extremely slow progress for One Piece. Given my situation in the Army and routinely driving weekly to do a training exercise, it sounds like I wouldn’t be able to do anything entertaining even if I wasn’t on a training exercise, but there’s a hell of a lot of down time that gives me my pick of the litter. There were the usual series I still had listed for viewing as well as the occasional movie that YouTube lets me watch for the small price of a skippable advertisement for a product I care little about. One such movie:
The impact of budget is often lost on the audience. This movie’s lack of funding was why they used coconuts… no evidence though that it explains the sparrow.
Read More »An update on a declaration
Some time last year, I made a bold declaration to give some older anime series a rewatch, namely Giant Pirate Adventure and Space Monkey Mafia. I was able to watch Dragon Ball Z’s Kai dub on the Internet Archive from start to finish, at first before leaving for the Army, and again while in. For One Piece though, I made mention of its pacing problem before which kept me from watching it as consistently at first. Following that, I looked for the One Pace recut to do away with all the half-isode runtime that was standard practice at the time, if you’ve ever watched orignal Naruto, Bleach or the original cut of Dragon Ball Z.
I’m still in the process of completing One Pace after getting back into it from the insistence of a fellow soldier whose exposure to the series is more personal. So far, I’m on the Drum Island arc. Yeah, yeah, snails pace and all that.
But I am rediscovering what appeals to so many about Luffy’s adventures. The core of the series is merely to search for the legendary treasure of the legendary Gol D. Roger: a posthumous character who took the location of his treasure with him to the grave.
Read More »Speak, penis, for you have the floor… and the p[nyan]y.
My reluctant review of F[crash]k You! Actually F[horn]ks You Into the Harem ended with a mention of another series that was pushing the envelope, so much so that it took Funimation three episodes to realize it might as well have been hentai. And looking at it’s content, I really wanna go back in time to Funimation’s as of yet unclaimed office, stare the big boss/manager/whatever in the face and say, “With a premise like this, what were you expecting? Raunchier KonoSuba?”
Memes prove that the joke wrote itself
We return once again to a currently serializing manga slated for an anime adaptation in the near future. The manga in question debuted in September 2023 and was licensed for western serialization by the likes of Viz Media: Kagurabachi.
Been a while since we’ve done one of these
Out-of-schedule topics haven’t been a thing on this blog in over two months since I wrote about BLACK TORCH rising from the grave. The next topic will cover an anime I was really on the fence about watching, so take this one as a calm before the storm, so to speak. And thankfully one I’d been looking forward to for years.
A misnomer since it’s a manga as of writing this
Let me know if this sounds familiar, a shy, nerdy girl with a nonexistent social life in middle school redoes herself come high school into a gyaru and becomes the cock of the walk at school with an expanding circle of friends. Quick! What am I describing? A new and circulating manga or an R-rated doujin by Shindo L?
Shame its a one-off
Sometime in 2018, Bleach mangaka Tite Kubo released a one-shot manga known as Burn the Witch, starring two lead female MCs: Ninny Spangcole and Noel Niihashi.
What Went Right and What Went Wrong
I’ve said before that I don’t make a beeline for Isekai. I don’t love or hate it, I’m just indifferent and for a while I was curious why so damn many anime fell under the Isekai genre as of late, but looking at the goings on in Japan, it wasn’t hard to connect the dots. The same could be applied to much of the rest of East Asia, all things considered. There are still a few Isekai that I enjoy and stop me if these sound familiar: KonoSuba, Overlord, I have plans to watch The Saga of Tanya the Evil, Gate, and probably Re:Zero if more people shut up about it. Technically, I got the gist of what to expect from all of these thanks to the Isekai Quartet parodying all of them.
But it’s no substitute for all of them. Watch the originals or read their source material if you haven’t already.
Read More »
Opinions on Entertainment 