2025.8.23

Context: Kakkou no Iinazuke (A Couple of Cuckoos)

It's a weird feeling. This might be the true mediocre of similar genres - it definitely can't be said as very good, but it's not horrible either (I'm looking at you, a certain unmistakenably trashy show). It has a few problems, undoubtedly. The rhythm isn't one of them - you aren't really supposed to focus on the rhythm part when it comes to 2-season long highschool love comedies by now; but none of my conspiracy theories about the entire situation really makes enough sense and doesn't rely on assumed info they haven't given us (e.g. they could reveal things like "oh the poor dad is actually from the same rich family as the rich dad and he just left because of a rebellious phase hissy fit" which would then explain a lot of stuff), and that really annoyed me.

The rich dad character is bad. Is he really 57, or it's simply because the author(s) needed a larger number? He somehow feels much less mature than the poor dad who's whole 21 years younger. I pretty much don't enjoy the "parent/older siblings being the overhanging schemer" trope ever since the trainwreck that's known as Oregairu. Maybe it's just me getting old and have lost the patience for people who needlessly overcomplicate things, but Lord have mercy, you're directly meddling with highschool romance with adult power and authority, don't you feel at least a little bit of senselessness in this?

I sense an uptick of girls having complicated emotion pattern; I think this is more of a good thing than a bad thing.

2025.8.19

Context: Harapan by The Cottons

The guitarist of one of my favourite Japanese rock band, Gama, mentioned this song in one of his tweet, so I went and gave it a listen and HOLY -- this has to be one of the most haunting song I've listened in years. To be fair there do be many different kinds of "haunting", like for example The Dripping Tap by King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard is also haunting but of a different kind. This song, Harapan by The Cottons, is a beast on its own. First of all the whole thing is 16 minutes long - how often do you come across pop songs that are 16 minutes long?? Second of all, before reading the lyrics, the way the main vocal sings in this song has always been slightly bothering me - it sounds like it's supposed to be a pretty, quiet and calm song but why do I keep feeling this slight bit of eeriness? And then I read the lyrics and the eeriness makes full sense immediately. It doesn't sound like a sad song - although it might be because I don't know Indonesian and rely on machine translation - but the sadness it's able to depict and convey is at such a strong level. What is this feeling they're putting in my brain?? Existential dread???

2025.8.11

Context: Tawawa on Monday

To say this is an "ecchi show" is a miscategorization. It's a much tamer show with a very strong focus on breasts but zero need for censorship because there's no explicit thing happening explicitly: the furthest it has gone is to show someone's bra; it's hard for me to be that uptight enough to say it should be treated like other ecchi shows (e.g. Takamine-san). The fact that the show focus more on the relationships between the characters (and big boobs of course) is going to bring much more substance into its story than your normal ecchi shows that are driven almost solely by sexual occurences. Is it a good show that bears watching seriously? Not really; but as something to kill the time with while you're waiting for your cup noodle to cook? Sure, I can't see why not.

2025.8.5

Context: Nande Koko ni Sensei ga!?

It's rare to have a show this lack of substance. I can literally summarize the plot within this sentence: very young female teachers (all early 20s) somehow got jobs at the same highschool, having inexplainable accidents which always end up in borderline sex situation with their respective male students like tit-sucking (it somehow is a common occurence) and urination (!), ended up becoming couples, (presumably) had actual sex, the end. Unlike margarine which tastes nothing like butter (the Irish ones don't; they all taste horrible), this is really just like hentai but with the banging part cut. Unfortunately yours truly is the kind of people who would seriously watch Highschool DxD solely for the story, so to be honest I'm not exactly enjoying it a lot while watching this show. Good thing it's short, eh?

2025.8.3

Context: https://x.com/TheSliceofAnime/status/1951619923358175664

I haven't talked about this, but Gushing Over Magical Girls is seriously one of the better animes I've seen over the years. The perversion of the main protagonist is shown in such a refreshing way, that all the actual sexual stuff feels like to me like they are merely the tiny bits of the extra moldy parts of a good piece of Roquefort cheese. Adolescent sexuality in anime has almost always been done in a very plastic manner (as to not offend people, I assume); it's either being performatively innocent, being treated as the butt (pun massively not intended) of jokes (e.g. Please Put Them On, Takamine-san and the more fabled Shimoneta), or genuinely sucks to look at (e.g. Sora no Otoshimono. I know it's from a different era, but I genuinely couldn't stand the male protagonist.) I know nothing about the team behind Gushing Over; but I'd imagine at least some of the key roles must be women and were actually writing their own experiences.

A few comments on the tweet recommended Eromanga Sensei, Yosuga no Sora and Imouto sae Ireba Ii. because "haha incest", but the last one is sincerely good (once you get past the absolute madness of the few minutes in the beginning, the rest of it is actually a great young adult slice-of-life show). The same thing cannot be said about Eromanga Sensei (the plot is just not that good) and probably not for Yosuga no Sora as well (I haven't watched it, but it's an galgame adaptation and galgame adaptations are generally not to be trusted; see my previous posts on Grisaia).

But - with that said, what actually are the ones that are good for beginners? It has to be acceptable by normies, able to break whatever kind of stigma in their head, and not to paint outside the very narrow normie lines so that we don't waste the great grace they've bestowed upon us lowly anime-watching weeaboos. I tried to think of the ones that (1) are short enough (should be only one season, unless it's good enough to justify a length longer than that) and (2) are distinct enough to show the media's potential without being too popular, and I think the following would be good choices:

• Hyouka. I shouldn't have to explain this one - come on, it's Hyouka! Actually, considering the tweet the context post has quoted listed Your Name under the "Anime for Beginners" category, I'd say Hyouka is just as fitting. It's strange no one talks about it these days - maybe it's because it has such a clean ending that killed off any possible further discussions. That said, I'd imagine band kids might enjoy Hibike! Euphonium more, although I haven't watched it myself and can't really be sure.

• Angel Beats!. I think Maeda Jun peaked in this work; Charlotte really isn't as good. Angel Beats! is not meme-able; characters may joke around from time to time, but the whole story is very serious (Maeda Jun's special flavour of seriousness), so serious in fact, that despite having watched it several times, I really can't think of a moment in the show that I can wholeheartedly make a meme out of.

• Re:Creators. Does your target like shounen battle scene? Make them watch this. If they didn't enjoy the show, they should at least appreciate the idea behind it; and if they didn't even do that, their future opinions on anime can be safely disregarded.

• Kino no Tabi: The Beautiful World (the newer version made in 2017). What Kino no Tabi is, is "fables for grown-ups". The original TV version is even more so, but modern human don't necessarily enjoy the old art style. Either way, watch it, it'd make you rethink a thing or two.

• Shirobako. (Secretly a Japanese TV drama in anime form?) This is good for people who believe that anime are all fantasies without a single bit of realism. "Not enough realism"? Well now you can have all the realism in the world, let's see how you like it.

• Vivy: Fluorite Eye's Song. For people who like science fictions. For more machine-leaning, see 86 and even the Gundam series. For "softer" and more AI leaning, see Beatless. Vivy is a good compromise with a very good story.

• Princess Principal. This is not necessarily a good "beginner" choice (sometimes girls are too cute and people might not be able to handle that), I just listed it here because I really enjoyed it. It somehow became a sleeper, and I believe that Gigguk needs to be partially responsible for this because I've never heard him mentioned it in his videos.

A few shows that people might say it's good (and they are) but I think is not particularly suited for "beginners":

• Frieren: Beyond Journey's End - Too strong of a shounen polish. No matter what people say, anime veterans will know it's very shounen deep down. If you're gonna do this, you want to move them away from the shounen stereotype, not towards it.

• Kaguya-sama: Love Is War - One of the best romcom anime in maybe ever, but my gut feelings tell me that while it's good for someone who's already seriously begun their weeb journey, it's not necessarily a good choice as someone's first anime (watching Dragonball Z and/or Naruto when you're a kid doesn't count). Sometimes anime has a particular storytelling style which I'd imagine stems from Japanese comedy, and it's something you have to ease people into gradually.

• Cyberpunk: Edgerunners - This is actually a great choice if your target likes games but bizarrely doesn't like anime (it's okay we don't kink shame people here), but it's not very good if your target doesn't like any of the things shown in the show, so proceed with caution. Also, you absolutely have to get the version with Japanese voices; this issue in particular is unnegotiable.

• Samurai Champloo - The story is too Japanese. Some people might be extra closed-minded and will not appreciate that.

• Higashi no Eden - I'd imagine a lot of people don't like sophisticated plot with no big satisfactory resolution, but if your target claims that they're a movie connoisseur, this one (and Samurai Champloo) might work wonders.

A Chinese Font I've Searched For 15 Years

2025.8.1

As I've explained elsewhere, the so-called "script fonts?" in this page is actually a very old font that has been around for years. If my memory serves me correctly, I first encountered it in 2006 in a text editor with a weird built-in input method, and I've been wondering where that font comes from ever since, because most (if not all) bitmap Ming fonts has 1px strokes, which isn't really serif-y enough for a very serif-y family of typeface. This font that I was looking for is totally different: thick vertical strokes, proper serifs at the end of horizontal strokes, everything about it tells you its original designer was really trying to capture the essence of "Ming"-ness within the available limits.

And today I've finally been able to confirm a good part of its origin. As it turns out:

• It's originally made by the Institute of Software of "Academia Sinica" (which is now called the Chinese Academy of Sciences) in 1988.
• The font has been a part of XFree86, where Plan 9 got it from.
• Apparently it was donated to XFree86, but since XFree86 started a few years after the time mark of 1988, I'd imagine it had been used in certain internal systems and might have been distributed among colleges and institutes prior to this. It might have been released under the MIT license first and then picked up by XFree86 later; I didn't dig further.

Someone has made a vectorized version of the 16px font. I don't really recommend using it other than for stylistic reasons because it was designed against the GB2312 standard which lacks a lot of characters that may appear in the text you need to render (and font fallback is not pretty because it has such a distinct look), but I'm definitely going to use it when truly applicable.

2025.7.27

I never thought Nanjing Sister Hong would become this big of a sensation. I really thought that it would be just another weird case among many other weird cases in China and people would forget about it in three months, but I was wrong. Maybe it's because I've just talked about Yaju Senpai recently, Sister Hong reminded me of him because both engaged in sodomy and both are memed to hell, admittedly the two are very different in any other regards. This video, however, draws the comparision from it w/ Bonnie Blue; and from this I'd like to make the following conjecture:

Every Internet sensation is secretly a triptych: a normal version from the West, a better version from Japan, and a worse version from China. They don't necessary appear or go viral within the same time frame, but for every Internet sensation in the West, the Japanese and Chinese counterparts of it would exist to form this triptych eventually.

I Tried To Make Sense Of This One Song

2025.7.22

フューチャー・イヴ (Future Eve) is a song written by sasakure.UK, presumably for the 10th anniversary of Magical Mirai. If you're a Vocaloid fan but haven't heard of sasakure.UK yet, you're seriously missing out. If you like sasakure.UK but still haven't listened to this song yet, you're seriously missing out; it's seriously a good song. I want to briefly mention this song because for whatever reasons my perception of the chorus of this song was one beat too late (or too early; I'm not quite sure. After resetting how I understand the song I forgot how I hear it the first time...)

The correct way to understand the first line of the chorus should probably be like this, with と being at beat 1:

Update 2025.7.28: I was finally able to hear it like I've heard it the first time again! For only a few times, at least. My original perception is one beat too late which made the snare appear on beat 4 instead of beat 3 (which, curiously, is the exact opposite of what The Spiders did - in the first half of their first album they put snares on beat 1, 2 and 3). I'm still curious about why I had heard it that way.

2025.7.20

The two sequels of Grisaia is surprisingly decent, much more decent than the choppy first installment. One should treat Grisaia Phantom Trigger as their own thing. I did plan to watch it at first, but I couldn't get over the fact that it's a spin-off with a set of (almost) completely different people, so I dropped it. I'm not the kind of person who can take spin-off well, and this particular instance is even worse; to me, Grisaia no Rakuen was such a strong and satisfying closure that I cannot separate the name Grisaia from the main story that ended; every subsequent spin-off thus feel strongly out of place.

2025.7.19

• Was watching The Fruit of Grisaia. It's a very "early 2010s" show; the chibi style (very similar to the ones of Yuzusoft!), the definitely-above-average amount of panty shots, the way the male protagonist is written and the distinct choppiness in storytelling made it very clear that it's an adaptation from an adult visual novel. I'm now currently at ep. 10 and I see no seriously adult things like nudity, although I definitely not saying it's completely safe for work.

  I believe there's a very distinct flavour of charm (metaphor massively not intended) that only visual novels (and their adaptations) can provide; I'd imagine it's rooted in their intrinsic storytelling logic. Would look more into this in the future...

  • ACHTUNG! (2025.7.19): Yeah, I finished the show just now, it's got some edgy (one might even say needlessly edgy) plot and some very edgy plot w/ NSFW scene (some sex, some gore, and some human cannibalism (!)) and it's the kind of edgy plot that's only going to be allowed in adult visual novels. Welp, that was certainly refreshing, even if one may not want that kind of refreshment...

• My understanding is that there likely won't be a Call of The Night Season 3, and in the case it happened, there probably won't be a Season 4. The whole after-hour schoolyard story got squished into a few cuts of flashbacks and lumped together with Mahiru's encounter with Kiku in ep. 2; I have no explanations other than they're planning to tell most of the story (right up to the Kiku arc) within one season, which is very rushed; and despite this, the anime itself is somehow still holding up pretty good. The team behind it is good, I'll admit this.

2025.7.12

Takopi's Original Sin
Is An Okay Story

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2025.7.10

Is Laufey jazz?

(Original publishing date: 2023.9.28)

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2025.7.9

I Have
My Own Reasons
To Not Talk About
This AI-Generated Song

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2025.7.9

Looking Back At Zaako

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2025.7.8

Goodnight Punpun Is
One Hell Of A Manga Series

and I'm so grateful that I'm a loveless asexual bastard with barely any friends.

(Original publish date: 2023.4.22)

(spoilers ahead. you have been warned.)

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2025.7.8

(Context: this video shared by Hideo Kojima)

It looks insane but it's pretty depressing if you're forced to live in it with the Hong Kong weather. I've lived in Shenzhen (directly north) for 5 years and in Canton City (only a bit further north; think about Wexford to Dublin) for most of my life; the summer there is the one thing that I absolutely don't miss the most.

2025.7.6

(On Danjo no Yuujou wa Seiritsu suru? (Iya, Shinai!!))

(See #p1)

It's actually quite insane - the resolution of Episode 12 is so absurd it somehow managed to make the show half-palatable. I suspect the author knew this intuitively - sometimes to properly clean up after a failed Deus-Ex-Machina, you may very well need to remove the Deus-Ex-Machina itself. Either way, I think it's unlikely that we will ever have the chance to endure through a Season 2 of this stuff, and I think some of us could use that info...

2025.7.5

I do suggest one refrain from doing whatever this show is doing. To randomly bring out an adult figure to put the "real love vs. co-dependency" trope onto the table almost always feels like nothing more than a cheaply-made Deux-Ex-Machina: these key characters feel like the insertion of the author himself because they almost always have ore information than their position in the story could've ever provided them with. To put it another way, they know the main protagonists are going through a co-dependency phase not because that's a conclusion that can be reached merely through their knowledge, experience and observation, but simply because that's what the author had in mind. This is - to adopt software engineering lingo - an abstraction leak. I do need to acknowledge that considering the true core conflict of the average Japanese highschool student - 進路 (career path) and its 調査 (survey) - being more like a looming background threat than anything, it would be hard to find a more natural and (more importantly) more common conflict than someone's love life without potentially offending anyone; and to claim that the main protagonists are in a toxic co-dependent relationship might very well be the only way to provide a chance to move towards a total resolution. But, even if that's the case, one would still need to execute this properly exactly because all of these clichés are well-expected...

2025.7.5

Just finished Lazarus. It was truly unfortunate. I sincerely believe the action should be toned down a little, and despite jazz being one of my favourite music genre, its soundtracks somehow failed to make an impression on me. People might say it has potential. - I'd disagree. You can't have much potential already when you've decided that this would be you're doing. It's easy to tell that it's made to entertain, but it's hard to convince yourself that it's made to make you remember.

2025.6.14

(On Danjo no Yuujou wa Seiritsu suru? (Iya, Shinai!!))

After the latest episode, I had an epiphany:

Whoever's behind this work has attempted an Oregairu on us.

And what do you know, over the years I've grown to hate the Oregairu-type plot with a burning passion.

If you didn't know what Oregairu is, its full name is "Yahari Ore no Seishun Love Comedy wa Machigatteiru", and it's a (now finished) long-running show that has multiple seasons with the final season ended a few years ago. I *do* recommend you to watch Oregairu, however, because it *do* give you the most basic amount of enjoyment from time to time, and despite the core motif of its later part (as well as certain characters in the show; if you know you know) gradually gears toward being painful to watch, it do be a slow-burn process (which smooths out some rough patches in terms of sentiment), and it do have a half-acceptable resolution.

The show in question, unfortunately, has barely any of that.

The title itself is already a disaster of its own, but judging a title isn't really fair, so we'll put that aside. In short, the premise is bad and really doesn't make any sense (unless it is actually based on real-life events; but then again that would only mean the real-life it's based on barely makes any sense too). The story overall is mid at best, with the amount of development less than your typical highschool romance. The characters are also very bland: for the two girls, if you remove the part of their background setting that's majorly related to the male protagonist, you'd barely have any background setting left; this is not completely unsalvagable if the author is given the chance (either by themselves and whoever's at that kind of position) to fully develop the remaining part, but I personally didn't see much of that in the anime.

Towards the end of the season there was an attempt of introducing a new arc with an antagonist onee-san character and the "co-dependency vs. true love" trope (now you see why I have to mention Oregairu in the beginning); this trope, especially the one between two teenagers, is an easy option for aspiring light novel writers and/or manga artists attempting their first long story because we all had been a good-for-nothing brat at some point, but it is unfortunately also *very* easy to overcook it and turn it into a boring edge-fest; it's not a tool you can use willy-nilly and expect it would magically raise a mid story to a not-so-mid level; the way this is done in this show unfortunately makes the whole thing feel very forced. I haven't read the light novel and I know nothing about the author, but I would say (provided that the anime is being faithful) this is an acceptable debut work and an acceptable debut work only; should the author write more in the future I would expect improvements.

That being said, I *would* watch the remaining episode in the mean time; with how the plot has been developed till now, it's only going to be either mid or edgy; either way, whatever remains is probably only going to be sense of relief instead of satisfaction.