Posts

The Ultimate Host's Mid-Year Review

Image
This year I'm serving as the Host (the Discord role is named “Ultimate Host” which goes hard) of my university's no-longer-unfortunately-named anime club, and the most active part of that role has been hosting the weekly anime viewings. Naturally this means I have the great(?) power of selecting what the club watches. The ones who show up, anyway. Since last year the format has been a bunch of seasonals with 1 episode of each per week and one older series with 2-3 episodes per week. I’ve kept it 3+2 and I think it has worked quite well, though there are some fundamental issues with the current format - mainly that spreading out series over so many weeks makes it difficult to just “jump in”. Conversely the upside is that we have room for variety with so many different series running at the same time. Finding a good balance would be nice at some point. Anyway, this post is just going to be me going over my choices and why I made them, as well as how they turned out - in my opinio...
Post a Comment
Read more

Top 10 Anime of 2025

Image
Moving onto accidental New Year's Eve traditions: it's time to go through the best anime of 2025. (If the image below doesn't fully show, like what happened last week, I don't know what causes it. Something on Blogger's end, because the image file is fine and Twitter accepts it without problems. Edit: fixed for this post. )  Top 10 New Anime: 10. Clevatess   Much of the fantasy anime being made these days is some flavor of narou-kei and/or RPG world no. 4269 (and good luck finding “dark fantasy” that isn’t just edgy revengeslop), so any departure from that feels fresh. Clevatess was a very pleasant surprise in that regard. The premise is interesting, the characters likable and the worldbuilding mostly avoids the pitfalls. The visual aesthetics aren’t always to my taste, but the story kept me engaged all the way through. 9. Li'l Miss Vampire Can't Suck Right   Cute romcom (in the anime sense of “no actual romantic progress but you can see it happe...
Post a Comment
Read more

Top 10 OPs & EDs of 2025

Image
Another year has passed, it's Christmas Eve again and my accidental Christmas tradition continues. In other words: it's time to go through the best anime openings and endings of the past year. Top 10 OPs: 10. The Shiunji Family Children OP “Honey Lemon” This list always needs a guilty pleasure one, so let's get it out of the way first. Heavily carried by the song, which surprised me with how good it sounds. The chorus melody just… works. Visuals range from tasteless to mildly innovative, with a lot of “just okay” in the middle - not unlike the series it's attached to. 9. Chitose Is in the Ramune Bottle OP “Liar” Not quite the kind of song I’d expect from a high school harem anime, but Chiramune is weird in many ways so I guess it fits. Looks amazing, with a heavy focus on the girls because of course, but the MC gets a solid amount of screentime too. 8. Ruri Rocks OP “Hikari no Sumika” Speaking of things that look amazing, we’ve got some incredible backgro...
Post a Comment
Read more

Behind the Tweets of 365 Revo Songs

A year ago I celebrated Sound Horizon’s 20th anniversary with a brief blog post where I advertised my Twitter bot  and said I might talk about my technical problems with it “in another blog post”. Well, one year later, this is that blog post.  Before I get into the behind the scenes (behind the tweets?) stuff, though, I’d like to say that I’m honestly just happy I was able to pull off this project. It never gained much traction even in this small fandom, but it was something and I learned a lot from the experience.  Alright then, let’s go back to the very beginning.  I think I got the idea for a Twitter bot that’d tweet daily Revo songs at some point during the summer of last year, can’t remember when exactly. Eventually I decided to make it an anniversary celebration project. On October 1st I tweeted  about it and got Guren to help out and give feedback on how I was matching songs and days. I created the bot account at some point before the 23rd. Dealing with ...
Post a Comment
Read more

One Year of Using Linux

Well, a few months more than a year at this point, but the title is nicer this way. I've been using Linux as my daily driver OS since December 2023, after years of Windows 10, so I thought I'd share how my experience has been. tl;dr: a lot of good but some issues. The Background   About a decade ago we had at one point a proper(?) desktop PC that ran Linux Mint, but the experience wasn't amazing - hardware issues mostly, from what I can remember. So, after it was thrown out, me and my sister used our dad's old Mac Mini for a few years. Not amazing but it worked. I got my first own computer in 2018. It was a used HP ProBook business laptop, bough from a Finnish company that specializes in buying perfectly fine but "outdated" business laptops from other companies and reinstalling Windows on them and selling them to consumers. The specs were already low-to-mid-end at the time (4th gen Intel Core i5 with integrated graphics and 8 GB RAM) but it did serve me well f...
Post a Comment
Read more

Five Years in Sound Horizon Kingdom

When did it all begin? If we're going all the way back, I could say September 22, 2018, the day on which I watched Spirited Away for the first time and kickstarted my now 6-years-and-counting love for Japanese fiction. Or maybe July 14, 2019, when I heard Revo's music for the first time in the form of Attack on Titan's first opening. But the fifth anniversary I'm commemorating today is not of either of those. It's of February 21, 2020, when I watched 5th Story Concert Roman on YouTube. And the rest is history. It's crazy to think about how different the world was - how different I was - five years ago. Those were the early weeks of the coronavirus spreading across the world. I was still living in what I consider my definitive childhood home. I was a 9th grader, about to graduate middle school and move onto high school, utterly unaware of how much that experience would be shaped by the pandemic. I was fifteen when I discovered Sound Horizon. Probably the best pos...
Post a Comment
Read more

Top 10 Anime of 2024

Image
It's been a very eventful year for me, but in the middle of everything I still managed to watch a pretty good amount of anime. From wolves and deer to kaiju and losing heroines, here's my top 10 of this year.  Top 10 New Anime: 10. Spice and Wolf Nothing extraordinary in terms of art and animation, but it was still nice to have a more down-to-earth fantasy anime. The second half in particular had many good episodes. Ami Koshimizu is great as Holo.  9. The Elusive Samurai I had high hopes for a Jump anime from Team Umehara, and sometimes those hopes were met and even surpassed, but far too often I was left disappointed. Some of it was due to the story not always knowing which tone was appropriate, some was the usual Aniplex planning causing visible melting. It really was a series of ups and downs.  8. Senpai is an Otokonoko Despite the modest production and sometimes mistimed mood swings, I ended up getting really invested in this one. It's always nice to see LGBT stories ...
Post a Comment
Read more