pluvia33's Blog

Anime Relations: Akudama Drive

Happy New Year??? So, 2020 is over. A year that has been worse than damn near anyone could have ever reasonably imagined. The COVID-19 pandemic alone was more than enough to make this one of the worst years ever, but on top of that we here in the wonderful United States had massive protests due to the continued murder and brutalization of people of color by our police, which ended up resulting in more murder and brutalization by our police as well as domestic terrorists masquerading as “militias” supposedly “protecting property” from “rioters” while in reality they were largely just a bunch of racists (some of which belonging to actual racist hate groups) wanting an excuse to commit acts of violence. And then of course we had our wonderful president doing his best to destroy what little democracy our country had left so he could become a dictator or something.... Ugh, I’ll shut up about the stuff that’s totally not related to anime or the resolutions I made, but damn, this has been a stupid year....

So per usual, I’m going to go ahead and talk about each of my 2020 New Year’s Resolutions that I made at the beginning of the year and how I did with them. Spoiler: I was largely unsuccessful again this year! If not worse than how unsuccessful I was with my 2019 resolutions. Now, I did already talk about how COVID-19 was screwing things up in this “Mid-Year Check-Up” post, so I’ll try not to rehash too much from that. Sorry that I’ll be referencing stuff I’ve already said in that post, but hey, it’s not like many people are going to read this anyway, so whatever.

Also, after talking about my different resolutions, I’m going to talk about a few other general thoughts that my resolution discussion won’t cover and then talk about the closest thing I’m going to have to a resolution for 2021 (essentially the “Looking Forward” part of this post’s title).

Health Stuff: Yep, I’m still fat, hovering around 250 lbs. At least I didn’t get any higher than that since I was back up at that mark during my mid-year check-up. Yeah, pretty much everything from that mid-year check-up still applies. I don’t have much else to add other than, well, at least I never got COVID?? That’s something to be thankful for, I suppose. The only time I went to see the doctor since the mid-year check-up was to get a COVID test which came back negative. It really sucks to put all of this health stuff on hold and being drained of all motivation to better myself on my own, but man all of this quarantine stuff has been justifiably discouraging.

Social Stuff: Yeah, since the mid-year post and the sad, sad disappointment of how the first “date” I’d ever gotten out of online dating went nowhere, I haven’t had anything come even that close to getting a new girlfriend. Ugh, I don’t really want to think about it. Trying to get into dating (online or otherwise) as a geek in his mid-30s living in a relatively small-town kind of area was already hard enough and then adding COVID to it has just been a disaster. Wheee.... Outside of that, hanging out with David and Ashley went about the best it could considering the pandemic and being a decent distance away. The few times I was able to hang out at their place had been the brightest spots for me over this year. And Paul and I have made plans to finally start doing game nights again starting this Friday, although it’s pretty much definitely going to be just the two of us for now as his wife and daughter are too busy having lives and such. Hopefully more people can be added to the group later, preferably after the COVID stuff is more under control. Oh! And a final little note, I did end up deleting my Facebook account at the end of 2020! That’s a thing, I guess, even though I pretty much stopped using FB for anything but a little bit of the messenger anyway. Blah.

Trim Down My “Watching” and “On Hold” Anime: So yesterday I posted the final update for my “Finish Them” self-challenge thing and while I didn’t quite hit the mark of having only 30 or fewer items left in my On-Hold list, getting it down to 45 isn’t too bad and I do only have 5 items in my Watching section now! All of which I am actually more-or-less truly actively watching. I’d say this was largely a success and it was something that didn’t really get hit all that hard by COVID. I mean, I did feel pretty damn lethargic and didn’t quite feel like watching anime at some points, but having the self-challenge helped to keep me on track and give me a little push for it. So hey, something kind of positive? Yay? This was overall a nice experience, but I don’t think I’ll be doing anything like this for 2021 (more on that below). And getting things out of stagnation did get a few new things to hit hard in my personal favorite rankings. The biggest hits out of my Finish Them initiative were Chihayafuru and Hyouka which both got full-10s from me and are currently my #30 and #31 ranked favorites respectively on my Top 100 Anime/Manga Series List.

Play All of the Board Games on my Shelf: Yeah.... After all of the COVID stuff and especially after my mid-year check-up I pretty much gave up on this happening. I don’t even feel like checking on how many unplayed games that I have left to get through.... Well, doing a quick filter of my board game collection on BGG, it looks like I have more unplayed games than I started the year with. Yay.... But yeah, this was the year when my most reliable board game partners all moved away. In the case of David and Ashley it wasn’t absolutely devastating since they “just” moved to Albuquerque and if it wasn’t for the pandemic I probably would have been seeing them about as often as before. But as for Desirae and Ken (my ex-wife and her husband), they moved overseas so they’re completely out of the picture now. But as kind of mentioned above, I did get into a bit of gaming with a still-local acquaintance-level friend named Paul and hopefully that can be a regular thing.

Read All of the Manga on my Shelf: I was actually relatively hopeful during the mid-year post that I might still be able to pull this off, but nope. I was just barely able to at least finish off my reading of the manga version so the Suzumiya Haruhi series in time for the new novel to finally come out! Although I kind of got sidetracked in reading that after a bit. Motivation has been really hard to maintain. Blah.

Accomplish Something Significantly Creative: Well, look at this thing right here!! I actually created my first full-length AMV project!!! So yeah, this is at least one resolution that I was 100% success at fulfilling based on the stipulations stated! I’d really like to make some more as well and hopefully I’ll get on that soon. I also made a little bit of progress towards my “Junk Mecha” prototype and will hopefully get more done on that soon? We’ll see!



Other 2020 Anime Watching: While I primarily focused on my Finish Them initiative, I did do a little bit of anime watching outside of that in 2020. The biggest hit of the year for me was actually Re:Zero. I was originally a little late to the game, having watched it a year after it originally aired, and I liked it quite a bit! But, I didn’t quite SUPER love it and it got a “9” from me, sitting somewhere in the 50s on my Top 100 (actually, it was #50 exactly on my last official Top 100 update). However, I ended up re-watching the series via the new director’s cut rebroadcast this year in preparation for the second season and I loved it more upon rewatching, bumping it up to a full-10 and having it land somewhere in the 30s, I think. I don’t know how much of that was me appreciating the story more on the rewatch or if some of the extended scenes legit made it better. And THEN the first half of the 2nd season came around and shot the series up even higher for me! It is now currenting sitting as my #18, just barely getting above long-time favorite action series Black Lagoon. The second season also finally got me to choose a “waifu” for the series (or just best-girl/favorite girl; honestly the “waifu” thing has begun to get old and annoying for me). When watching the first season, I actually never picked a side in the whole Emilia vs. Rem thing. I thought they were both great characters and deserving of love, but neither of them were characters that I personally loved; like they probably wouldn’t hit a Top 30 list of my favorite female anime characters at this point. However, with 2nd Season, I know have my official Re:Zero waifu: Echidna! Yes, she is kind of a total bitch, but hey, Haruhi is one of my favorite characters ever, so maybe that’s just kind of one of the things I’m into? While some of the key scenes Subaru had with Emilia and Rem were highly emotional, there were few things in this series (or anime in general) that hit me as hard as a certain relatively simple yet extremely significant conversation that he had with Echidna.... Anyway, I’ll go ahead and shut up about Re:Zero now. I’m super looking forward to Part 2 of the second season! Just two more days!! Aside from Re:Zero, the only other 2020 I’ve watched to completion where four Fall 2020 series that I randomly ended up starting while visiting David: Akudama Drive, Sleepy Princess in the Demon Castle, Moriarty the Patriot, and Magatsu Wahrheit. And that’s them listed in order from my favorite to least favorite. Akudama Drive was pretty amazing, getting a very high-level “9” from me, currently sitting as my #54 favorite anime/manga series. Sleepy Princess was just delightful, getting a low-level “9”, just barely missing the Top 100 ranking (it’s literally my #101 right now). Moriarty was a solid fun alternative take on the Sherlock Holmes story, getting a respectable “8” from me; will definitely check out the 2nd Season due to air in April. And then Magatsu Wahrheit was a complete and utter mess, getting a solidly “bad” and pretty rare 4-score from me; I wrote a review on the series in case anyone is interested in the details. But yeah, that’s mostly it with anime watching outside of the Finish Them thing! Well, I also started watching Madoka Side Story (with my friend Dan) and Asteroid in Love (by myself), but get sidetracked on both, having only watching the first two episodes of each. I’ll hopefully finish them both soon, even if I have to switch to watching Madoka alone. We’ll see!

Video Games(?): For nearly the entire time that I’ve become really good friends with David, my main board game buddy, it has been a bit of a running joke that I’m “totally over video games” these days. There’s a good deal of truth to that statement, though. While tabletop gaming has become a very close second to anime/manga when it comes to my biggest hobbies, video gaming has become a rather distant third place, I think. But, with the pandemic and all, I have been spending more time playing video games this year than board games. For the first time in a very long time, I bought a brand new game within weeks of its release date: Final Fantasy VII Remake. I played the crap out of it and loved it quite a bit. Sadly re-playing it on Hard after beating the game has been rather difficult, so I don’t know if I’ll ever 100% the game or not when it comes to the Trophies. I’ve also been really into Pathfinder: Kingmaker, which is essentially a digitization of the tabletop RPG. Although, I have developed a bit of a love/hate relationship with that game as it kind of runs like crap on the PS4 with crazy long load times and crashes. But I do love how it plays for the most part when it works how it’s supposed to. And then there’s porn games.... Yeah, I think I began getting into these in mid-2019, but like with other video games, my consumption of porn games has increased in 2020 due to the pandemic. And when I talk about porn games, I’m mainly talking about the deep indie porn game scene, largely made up of just a few people making small visual novel projects and other stuff mostly made using either RPG Maker or Ren’Py. There are literally thousands of these games out there and I’ve literally tried HUNDREDS of them! Seriously, I know this for a fact because so many of them are bad and the release tracking sites I visit have so many of them come up multiple times that I have a spreadsheet filled with the ones I’ve tried and didn’t like so that I know not to download any future releases; there are over 300 games on that list! XD But, for every 10 or so stinkers, I find one that I truly legitimately enjoy quite a bit, and there are currently 9 specific games that I love enough to throw a dollar or two towards the developers’ Patreon accounts each month. Anyway, I’ll spare going into too much more detail on this right now. Anyone who’d take a semi-close look at my anime or manga lists on here will now that I’m a pervert (and an actual real-close look will reveal that I’m a pretty depraved one at that), but I don’t want to go on and on about this subject. I’ve actually been considering doing a BIG blog post all about this subject, because there are some pretty interesting aspects to this particular sub-hobby of gaming. We’ll see!

Other Stuff??: Hmmm, so other than everything that’s been discussed so far, has there been anything else of significance in this past year with me?? Well, while my shelf of manga reading didn’t spawn much of anything particularly interesting to talk about in my main resolution reflections, I did do a bit more of audio book listening. After listening to the Kizumonogatari audio book a couple of years ago, I ended up listening to all three parts of Bakemonogatari this year and in doing so the Monogatari Series ranked up a few spots on my Top 100 list, from #5 to #3, and in honor of that I wrote a review of the First Season audio books that have been released so far. There have been other audio books that I’ve really wanted to listen to, but I usually listen to them while on drives and the pandemic made it so I wasn’t traveling as much as I would have liked (I would have gotten a LOT of “reading” done if I’d gone to Ohio like I originally planned to around Thanksgiving). This year I also got heavily into watching the progressive news YouTube channel The Damage Report after David shared a TYT video of this show’s host with me and pointed out his board game collection in his quarantine background. Over the last 8 months, John Iadarola has become one of my favorite non-fictional people. Similarly, I also got into the YouTube channel Thought Slime on recommendation from David, although he’s more of a commentator than a news reporter. It’s been nice to be exposed to some new voices that align with my views, since before all I really had were the satirical talk show hosts like Stephen Colbert, Trevor Noah, Samantha Bee, and John Oliver. I did watch a little bit of non-anime real TV this year. I finally got around to watching all of Community and loved it quite a bit (kind of to be expected for me considering that it was done by Dan Harmon, co-creator of Rick and Morty). Although, it is going to be a bit of a weird thing for me as I finally watched it on recommendation from the girl that I had one date with and then got ghosted.... XD Yeah, since I had anime and YouTube to largely keep me occupied when it comes to passive entertainment, I didn’t watch a whole lot of stuff this year. And honestly, I think that’s about it as far as reflecting on 2020. Aside from pandemic stuff and what’s already been mentioned, not too much went on in my life.



One Resolution - Have the best year I can and do my best: So I was very deliberate in how I worded the main title for this section. After the utter shitshow that was 2020, there is no rational way to truly be looking forward to 2021. A change in the calendar isn’t going to magically make all of the troubles of 2020 magically disappear and while the “orange terror” is presumably no longer going to be our president in a few weeks, that doesn’t mean all of the troubles for bleeding-heart leftists like me are going to go away with him. At this point, all we can really do is look forward and just be at the mercy of what’s to come and hope for the best and do the best we can. With that in mind, that is my only “real” resolution this year and all that I can ask of myself at this point. Basically, I’m not doing a true formal 2021 Resolutions post and this paragraph is the closest I’m going to come to that this time around. I’m going to make an effort to make 2021 a better year than 2020, but only to the extent that I really feel up to it. There’s no telling what this year will have in store. We may have COVID vaccines, but at best we’re likely to be well into the summer before it’s distributed widely enough for things to really start to get better again in that regard. So yeah, measuring my expectations. I will discuss a few general-but-kind-of-specific resolution-like things that will go into me trying to do my best this year. I suppose these can be considered “soft resolutions”? Well, I’ll definitely take the COVID vaccine as soon as I’m able and see if I can try to get my general health and dental maintenance started back up again and generally due my best to be a little healthier overall. With anime watching this year, while the Finish Them thing was kind of nice, I most likely will NOT do any kind of anime/manga “challenge” things and instead just go with the flow. I’d like to instead watch a good amount of seasonal anime as it airs, maybe re-watch some things, and perhaps start watching as many KyoAni things that I haven’t gotten around to seeing yet. For reading, I’ll continue to work through reading my physical manga collection, but not be too hard on myself if I’m having issues. I’d like to play as many of my unplayed board games as I can, maybe putting a focus on things I can play solo. I’ll continue to “put myself out there” as far as dating goes and hope for the best; all I can really do is see what happens and maybe things will get better once COVID is taken care of?? Also with me planning to not do any kind of “challenge” things this year, that will mean I won’t constantly be doing any kind of recurring “Challenge Update” blog posts. Therefore, I’d like to make various blog posts, maybe at least monthly, and maybe finally do an official Top 100 Anime/Manga Series update and my first Top 30(?) Standalone Anime Movies post. I also think it might be nice to run a Pathfinder RPG second edition campaign if possible, COVID willing. And it’d be nice to continue to make more AMVs and also complete my first “Junk Mecha” prototype if possible.... Again, all of these are kind of just suggestions of things I’d like to do if I can. These aren’t going to be hard resolutions that I’ll be holding myself to. I just want to do the best I can and try to get the most out of 2021 if possible. For all we know, the entire first half of the year could be absolute trash because of continued issues dealing with COVID. But with that said, I’ll go ahead and end my rambling and say, best wishes to the new year for everyone!! ^_^

Anime Relations: Momiji (OVA), Honto ni Atta! Reibai Sensei, Shirokuma Cafe

Here it is! The FINAL update of my weekly “Finish Them” self-challenge.... And, it’s a bit of a “going out with a whimper, not a bang” kind of situation.... So Pathfinder: Kingmaker continued to consume my life this week. I got absolutely no anime watched during the weekdays because of it, only watching a little bit last Sunday and then yesterday (Saturday) evening to rush in a little bit of stuff to talk about in this final update. However, the technical issues in Pathfinder: Kingmaker really began to intensify and get on my nerves this week, causing a bit of a love/hate relationship between me and the game. In addition to the usual long load times and about-once-per-day crashes, the game has also been losing my newest saves at times which has just been infuriating. And while I absolutely love most of the things about the game from an actual gameplay standpoint when things are actually working as they should, there is one thing in the game that has begun to REALLY irritate me: Time Limits! There are two major aspects of Pathfinder: Kingmaker which just horribly butt heads at times. A big component of the game is building and developing your own kingdom, a mechanic that includes projects which takes weeks, months, or even years to really get going. It’s a really fun part of the game that you can get yourself lost in once you start to really understand the ins-and-outs of it all. But then you have the main story and as you’re working on your kingdom you might see an event come by saying something like, “Hey! Your kingdom is in danger of falling! If you don’t progress in the main story, everyone is screwed!!!” And then you might have to go off and put all of your attention on this big long quest-line that you’ve accidently been neglecting, and then have to rush through that as quickly as possible while ignoring important kingdom events because the quest is way on the other side of the map.... Yeah, that really sucks. And the sad thing is, the last major time this happened, the dungeon I was going through actually had some really cool parts to it that probably would have been a ton of fun! But due to being forced to rush through it because I really needed to get back to working on my kingdom events, and plus constantly being worried that the game might crash or I might lose a save, I felt the need to follow a walkthrough whenever possible and likely lost a lot of the enjoyment I would have otherwise had. It really sucks because I’m a HUGE Pathfinder fan, in both the traditional tabletop RPG and the Adventure Card Game; this video game could have had a chance of being another major favorite from this entertainment franchise. But the technical issues and the times when the game forces you to play a specific way really holds it back.

Anyway! Going on and on about a video game is a bit of a weird way to end this self-made anime watching challenge series of posts!! As I mentioned above before I got sidelined, this wasn’t a particularly impressive week of watching, but I will be talking about three different entries. I will be doing my first discussing of something I didn’t get to mark as “Completed!” this week since I indeed did NOT get the remaining 33 episodes of Polar Bear Cafe watched (not even close). Then I have one thing finished in the On-Hold section (a hentai) and one in the Dropped section (not hentai). Again, from what I said in my 2020 New Year’s Resolutions post, I had wanted to get my On-Hold section down to 30 or fewer entries, but I still have 45 sitting in there.... I started out the year with 69 (nice) entries in my On-Hold section, so is cutting that down by 24 particularly great?? I don’t know. I definitely would have felt better if I had at least cut that in half. Looking at the rest of my sections, the “Watching” list is much more impressive as I’ve finished all but one from the carry-over list that I started with, finishing 37 things! My actual on-list Watching section has been cute down to a major more reasonable 8 items (three of which should be dropping off very soon as they recently ended from last season) so that is really nice and very much a success! And while it wasn’t really a big focus of this self-challenge and wasn’t mentioned in my New Year’s Resolutions, I did revive and finish 10 things from my Dropped section. So grand total, I’ve finished 71 stagnate items off of my anime list this year. Yeah, I suppose that isn’t too bad! Also, I did technically finish at least one thing off of the list every week and that was the most basic stipulation of establishing this self-challenge. And while this initiative was my main focus this year, I did get a few other things outside of this self-challenge watched, so it hadn’t been a particularly bad year in anime watching for me. Although, there are a LOT of anime from 2020 that I really want/need to go back and watch. Continuations of series that I’d been watching with my friend Dan have been a particular sticking point since we haven’t been able to get together often to watch things, usually because he hadn’t felt up to it and doesn’t usually have the endurance to watch a whole lot in one sitting. My Hero Academia 4 and Madoka Side Story are currently stagnate because of him.... Anyway, if you’re interested, click on the “spoiler” tag and read about the things I finished (and didn’t quite finish) this week!

Anime Relations: Ane☆Haramix

Well, here I am once again, with my second-to-last update for this little Self-Challenge! And.... playing Pathfinder: Kingmaker kind of consumed my life this week. XD I’ve been getting REALLY into the game now that I’ve gotten into the actual kingdom building stuff. However, this game is also REALLY frustrating in that the load times are just RIDICULOUS and the game has a tendency to crash more often than I’d like. Good thing I’m saving crazy-often, gaming the system so I can scum-save damn near every skill check in the game!! XD Although, again, those load times and the time it takes to save the game.... UGH!! If I could find out that the game loads/saves in half the time on a PS4 Pro, I’d really consider getting one for this game!! I’m kind of curious how it’d run on my PC, but I still prefer to play my non-porn games on PS4 whenever possible....

Speaking of porn! As I mentioned last week, this was going to most likely be a cop-out entry using one or more hentai, and that turns out to have been the case! I only got one thing finish, checking off the top thing from my On-Hold section, a little 4-episode hentai. Read about it below if you like, as I go on and on about it for no particularly good reason. And sadly, I didn’t end up watching a single episode of Polar Bear Cafe this week, you know, because of Pathfinder. =P I’m really not sure if I’ll be able to finish the 33 remaining episodes of this anime over this final week.... I’ll try my hardest, I guess!

Anime Relations: Switch

What’d I do this week?? Well, I ended up getting a copy of the Pathfinder: Kingmaker video game on PS4. I’ve played it a good amount and have enjoyed it quite a bit so far. I’ve been a big fan of the Pathfinder RPG and the Adventure Card Game for a while now and this is essentially the tabletop RPG in digital form, especially when playing in turn-based-combat mode. There are a few simplifications like consolidating a lot of the game’s skills (there are 35 in 1st-edition Pathfinder RPG and only 11 in the video game) as well as some missing feats and classes, but it is still pretty solid and the changes they made are pretty understandable. I mean, I love the Oracle class in PFRPG but its Curse feature would have been a pain in the ass to translate to the video game. Anyway, again, it’s been pretty fun. Not too much else to report other than that I tried my hand at grooming my own dog yesterday, buying some doggy clippers and essentially giving Roscoe a shitty quarantine haircut. XD

When it comes to anime watching, this was “sort of” a cop-out week as the only thing I finished was only 1 new episode of anime watching. However, I did also make some progress on watching through Polar Bear Cafe, the final thing in my “Watching” section with 11 episodes watched of that this week. Just 33 episodes left!! I should be able to finish that at least over the next two weeks. Like I said before, I had really hoped to get my On-Hold down to 30 or less and that’s probably not going to happen by the end at this point, but I think I’ve gotten “close enough”. =P Anyway, read about the little OVA that I watched this week just to make sure that I had “something” finished. And hey! It’s actually not hentai this time (note, next week it probably WILL be hentai). ^_^

Anime Relations: Chihayafuru

So this was my first week back to work (telework) and it’s been a bit difficult to get back into a groove work-wise after being off for two weeks. Hopefully things will start getting batter Monday? Eh.... And really, I don’t have anything else to talk about when it comes to non-anime-watching stuff this time around.... So with finishing stuff, this week was just about the exact opposite of last week in a way. While I had to rush in the last few episode of last week’s 20-something episode series on Sunday morning, this time around I got a 25-episode series finished off Tuesday night! I talk about that experience more below, right away in the almost-cleared “Watching” section. Sadly, the last series in that section isn’t quite as “bingeable” with me only watching one episode from its 50-episode run. I’ll probably need to break it up over the next three weeks to get it finished off. We’ll see! Anyway, again, read below for the specific anime talk of what I finished this week!!

Anime Relations: Mouretsu Pirates

A little bit of a delay for this week’s posting, though I guess not really that much. But I did have to watch a few episodes this morning to finish up what I wanted to finish. Since this was my last week of vacation (staycation), I wanted to finish something substantial this time around. However, I also got a bit preoccupied with creating my first full AMV! So yeah, I watched an entire 26 episode series this week to get one of the last three things out of my “Watching” section, but needed to finish up the last three episodes this morning. And with that, I’m in the final stretch of this little Weekly Self-Challenge! While it will technically cross over into the new year, I’ll go ahead and have four more weeks of this, with my final Update on 3 January 2021, for a total of 52 weekly updates. Now, based on my New Year’s Resolution post, I wanted to get my “Watching” list down to things that I’m actually actively watching and my On-Hold down to 30 or less.... With 48 things in my On-Hold, I don’t know how likely that’s going to be, but we’ll see! And there are technically a four new “Watching” items that I need to get back to finishing that weren’t there at the end of last year, though three of them are kind of on “soft hold” because I’ve been watching them with other people.... Well, even if I don’t hit the exact stipulation that I set for myself, I’m confident that I should be able to consider this initiative to have overall been a success. But, I should probably shut up about this speculative talk now! I can reflect on how this has gone after I actually finish it! Anyway, read below on the thing I finished this week!

Anime Relations: Asobi Asobase

For Black Friday, Adobe had a sale of the subscription price for their "All Apps" package of production. I've been considering subscribing to at least get Premiere for a while now and while struggling to get used to GIMP, a free Photoshop alternative, I kind of wanted to get real Photoshop as well. And, since subscriptions those two products together was more expensive than the "All Apps" sale price, and since there were other programs in that package that I could find a use for, I went ahead and got the subscription!

I'd already used Photoshop for some basic image editing for my Darkstalkers Live-Action post, and now I've used Premiere to do some basic video editing to make my first complete full-length anime music video! Prior to this, the only AMV credit I had to my name was as part of AMV Hell Divided By 0 from 2008, the second X-rated project in the AMV Hell series and is now officially disowned by the creator of the series (along with the first AMV Hell 0). So, it's kind of nice that I now have another complete project to my name! And, it's all me this time around.

As I said, this is all very basic video editing, with me just trying to get familiar with using Premiere. This is an AMV for Asobi Asobase to "YAVA!" by Babymetal, one of my favorite songs by them, and a pretty fitting song for the anime since people tend to compare the Asobi Asobase ending theme to Babymetal. It took me 4 days to make the AMV, probably a little under 20 hours of work total?? I don't know. I wasn't really tracking. Anyway, here's the AMV!



Also, a direct download of the AMV can be found on AMV.org. This was fun to put together and I hope to learn more about video editing and such, like making things of better video quality and having that properly upload to YouTube at that same quality (I really don't know why the video quality on YouTube is noticeably worse than even the LQ file I had to upload to AMV.org when I used a file that was nearly double the size for YouTube). I have a ton of different ideas for AMVs that I want to make and since I'm paying $40 a month for my Adobe programs, I'm going to do my best to not let them go to waste! And on a nice note, since I've now completed an AMV, this is now a New Year's Resolution that I've officially succeeded at! Yay! ^_^

Anime Relations: Houkago: Nureta Seifuku, Renketsu Houshiki, Kuruneko, Seikon no Qwaser Picture Drama

This past week was the first half of my 2-week “staycation” which was originally going to be for a trip back to Ohio to be with family during Thanksgiving (thanks COVID). It’s been pretty nice so far. I didn’t do much in particular for the actual day of Thanksgiving. Just spent it by myself, played the solo mode for Wingspan for the first time and went for a walk. Didn’t even eat anything particularly festive, just my normal vegan bullshit. But it was cool. And overall, I’ve been keeping relatively busy/entertained this past week. I finished off the last four volumes of the Haruhi manga and started reading the brand new Haruhi novel! I got a little back into playing my Hard playthrough of Final Fantasy VII Remake and eventually got stuck on a fight that was a little too difficult for me (don’t know if I’ll ever get that trophy at this point). Got caught up on the four anime from this season that I started with David, though I think by the end of today I’ll have a new episode for all four of them to watch again (because that’s how weekly releases work). This week I also ended up getting an “all apps” subscription from Adobe because they had a Black Friday discount on the package. I mainly got it for Photoshop and Premiere. I’ve only done a little messing around with Photoshop so far, mostly with putting together the images for the Darkstalkers live-action movie casting post that I put together a few days ago (that was fun to make). But yeah, I’m hoping that paying for these programs monthly will help motivate me to finally get my shit together and start making AMVs again. =P

Anyway, overall I was happily letting myself get sidetracked by various things this past week, so when it came to my “Finish Them” commitment, I ended up doing a bit of a cop-out again, watching four random short things yesterday. So if you’re interested in reading about them, there are two in the On-Hold section (both hentai, so beware) and two in the Dropped section (one of which is heavy fan service, almost hentai, and barely animated).

Anime Relations: Vampire Hunter

Somewhat recently, my friend David and I were hanging out BS’ing and the subject of the Moster Hunter live-action movie came up, mostly due to us both watching the trailer reaction from Double Toasted. Somehow our discussion evolved into hypothetical video games that “filmmaker” Paul W. S. Anderson could also badly adapt into a US live-action movie (or series of movies). One of the first video games that we thought of was Darkstalkers and we talked about it for so long that we ended developing casting picks for 10 of the major characters for the movie! I saved that information and enjoyed it so much that I wanted to record it here, complete with pictures for each casting pick.

So let’s be clear: this is all just for fun! I call this a “Dream” Casting with dream in quotes because this is largely meant as a joke. And for the record, I have VERY LITTLE KNOWLEDGE about the Darkstalkers franchise, but I feel like that makes me in a way extra-qualified to help create this list! With that said, if this sounds at all like it might be fun for you, click on the spoiler button and read on!



And that’s it! If anyone out there happened to stumble upon this, I hope you enjoyed it as much as David and I enjoyed talking about it! Strangely enough, the more I look at these images with the actors and characters side-by-side, the less and less ridiculous this casting actually looks to me. Anyway, this has been fun to put together! Until next time, laters!

Anime Relations: Kyoushoku Soukou Guyver II, Kyoushoku Soukou Guyver (1989)

So I was originally going to be driving to Ohio yesterday to spend two weeks with family over Thanksgiving. However, with how much worse COVID has gotten lately, I decided it was the responsible thing to cancel those plans and maybe just try to do something with them virtually. I’m still taking two weeks off from work since it was already scheduled and I need to use up the leave by the end of the year anyway or I’ll lose it. That means I’ll get to just do next to nothing in particular mostly by myself for the next two weeks! While I was kind of looking forward to seeing my mom and siblings, in a way I like that I’ll just be chillin’ at home instead a little better, being the anti-social and lazy bastard that I am. =P But yeah, hopefully this will give me some time to make some major headway on my finishing of things. I mean, I only have three things left in my “Watching” section, so I’d say I’ve been doing pretty well with this thing! I’ve also been catching up on the four shows that I started with David a few weeks ago, so that’s nice. And I can hopefully finish off the last four volumes of the Suzumiya Haruhi manga to refresh myself on the story in preparation of the new novel coming out on the 25th! Looking forward to reading that! Anyway, one thing finished this week in the On-Hold section.