Erufailon4

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...

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...

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...

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 ...

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...

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...

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 ...

It's that time of the year again. I may have watched less anime on average than on many previous years, but I think the amount I did watch was perfect since selecting the 10 best openings and endings presented no difficulty. So here they are! A bit more laconic descriptions this time due to poor planning leading to very little time - truly the way of the modern anime industry.  Top 10 OPs: 10. Shoshimin: How to Become Ordinary OP "Sweet Memory" Quite stylized and sometimes very symbolic, but it does get across the most important things: sweets, and that Yuki Osanai is cute but also scary. The song is one of Eve's better ones.  9. Spice and Wolf OP2 "Sign" The Spice and Wolf remake didn't exactly have the best of luck in its animation department - serviceable but not remarkable in any fashion - but this OP makes the best of its circumstances with very effective imagery that doesn't need flashy animation to leave an impression.  8.  Alya Sometimes Hi...

Yeah, I know I'm a week late with this blog post. Been a lot going on so haven't been updating this blog much. But that should change in Near Future™. Anyway, happy (Around The) 20th anniversary, SH! The major debut album is a couple of months younger than me, so our ages match for most of the year. Fun coincidence, perhaps divine foreshadowing. And right off the bat, we already have anniversary projects from SH, including the shortly upcoming Halloween to Asa no Monogatari and its already released lead track Halloween Japanesque '24 - fun song, that. Also concerts but those I won't be able to see since they're in Japan. Here's hoping for a Blu-ray. In fact there's many concerts I'd like Blu-rays of. As for fan projects, ICYMI my  365 Revo Songs  Twitter bot is now up and running and will tweet one Revo song every day until the next anniversary. I had a lot of technical problems with getting it to run reliably, which I might talk about in another blog p...

A lot has happened since I last updated this blog. I went and touched grass (well, snow for over half of it - dear god it was cold this winter) and served 165 days (fairly standard length for rank-and-file soldiers) in the army. With my citizen's duty now fulfilled, I'm a free man once again, at least until that dim-witted dictator on the other side of our eastern border decides to mess with us. If that happens, Signalsman [redacted] may have to grab an assault rifle again. Here's hoping that never happens. With that out of the way, it's time for some more long-lasting big changes in my life. First of all: I'm now in my 20s! As of today. Happy Around 20th Birthday to me, yeah~ (as you can see, still a brainrotted Laurant). Secondly: I'm going to university! In a different city! Since it'd be a bit of a long commute, the third thing is that I'm moving on my own for the first time in my life! In fact, I'm celebrating my birthday in the middle of packin...

... or snow, I guess? With it being winter and everything. Almost minus 20 degrees Celsius at the time of me writing this! Let’s hope it warms even a little before next week. After all, I'm starting my military service next week. I've already written about it here months ago, but to recap: Finland has mandatory military service, 6 to 12 months depending on how important stuff one ends up doing. I'm aiming for 6 because it would fit my future plans, but who knows. What this means is that I'm going to be very busy for a few months starting from next Monday. So, I'm officially(?) putting this blog on hiatus. It's not like I updated it very often anyway, but it's likely going to be at least 6 months until I expect to post here again.  As for social media, I might still tweet every now and then but definitely less than usually. So, uh... if you really need to contact me for some reason, feel free to DM but don't expect a quick answer. It's going to be int...

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...

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...

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...

In July 2019, back when I was still very new to anime and was enthusiastically devouring anything interesting-looking I could find, I discovered  Attack on Titan . During the couple of weeks it took me to binge all three seasons out at the time, I was completely enamoured with its story and world, and was left to wait for the fourth season. While waiting for the season that would eventually start over a year later, my familiarity with the series and its opening theme songs also led me to a discovery that quite possibly changed my life.  First it was just Linked Horizon's opening songs, then the ending song, then the other AoT-themed songs that didn't appear in the anime itself, and before long I found myself watching the Shingeki no Kiseki concert on YouTube, completely in love with LH. I wanted more, and I got it in the form of Sound Horizon, a completely new world of musical storytelling that I previously had had no idea even existed. When I had consumed all of SH content av...