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Showing posts from December, 2023

State of the Collection: 2023 Edition

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In my previous collection update a year ago, I expected I'd buy in 2023 "maybe not as much as in 2022 but we'll see". I definitely did buy less manga this year, but for Blu-rays we did see and what we saw was that I ended up pretty much doubling my Blu-ray collection. I can thank the monetary graduation gifts I received as well as my work try-out for giving me the necessary budget to spend, but on the down side the shelf space is really starting to become an issue. Let's see how my collection looks as 2023 comes to its close.   Manga & Light Novels   Even in a relatively quiet year on the manga front, my collection grew enough for the larger size volumes to now occupy almost all of my top-left shelf. New arrivals on the English side this year were Bocchi the Rock!  vol. 1, Children of the Whales  vol. 2, Soloist in a Cage  vol. 1, the first two volumes of Oshi no Ko  and The Promised Neverland  vol. 3. As I recall most of them were ordered onl...

Top 10 Anime of 2023

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What better way to spend Christmas Eve than looking back on this year of anime? ... Well, probably many better ways. But this is the schedule I set for myself, and I'm going to stick to it. So, without any further ado...  Top 10 (Non-Sequel) Anime: 10. Insomniacs After School Nice, chill romance that had an interesting focus on photography and did a good job of developing the relationship.  9. Shy Might seem like just another gimmicky post-MHA superhero anime with said gimmick being that it's also just another post-Bocchi "she's just like me fr" anime, but has a surprisingly solid emotional and thematic core. The characters are more than just their archetypes and many of them receive quite a lot of development over the course of the series. Masaomi Ando's direction elevates the already good story.  8. Tearmoon Empire I didn't know pretty much anything about this one going in, so I was surprised by how funny it was. While the dramatic first scene might fool...

Top 10 OPs & EDs of 2023

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A bit of a boring title this year. Anyway! This has been an excellent year for anime openings and endings, to the point where especially with openings narrowing down a top 10 was extremely difficult. There were quite a few, like those of Tsurune: The Linking Shot , The Apothecary Diaries , Spy x Family Season 2  and Stardust Telepath , that would've made the list in any other year. But in the end, these are not "all the good stuff" lists - these are top 10 lists. The cream of the crop, the best of the best. So, let's get started.    Top 10 OPs   10. Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead  OP "Song of the Dead"   It would be an understatement to say that Zom 100 's production has been troubled. One example of its effects is the opening, which had placeholder visuals for a good portion of it until episode 9. The final(?) opening is worth the wait though: energetic, well choreographed and, most importantly, very funny. Much like the series itself. Song is a bange...