Weeknotes #14

Life

Nothing really coherent to say here. My laptop fan broke and that was scary but I fixed it like the harcore hacker I am. I'm super broke. My dad is going on a long vacation so I have another chance to take over his room for extra space while cleaning mine so hopefully I can start making progress on that again.

School

Finished my summer class with a good grade and started the Fall semester. Looking to be a pretty chill semester so far, two online classes, and my in-person classes are only 50 minutes long. (All my classes last semester were like an hour and a half and had labs so I was basically never home and that was pretty stressful.)

I'm feeling okay about this semester! Only thing I'm not feeling good about is that fact that I won't be able to graduate this semester but whatever, hopefull that future Spring semester will be chill too and I'll be able to start working.

Reading/Watching/Gaming

Like always this will be the longest section. I thought about making media logs a separate thing but then I just won't do the life and school stuff lol. I still want to give myself a reason to write about that even if I don't have much to say.

Anime

Lily and I finished the Apothecary Diaries and Cinderella Gray, Witch Watch is still ongoing. New to our lineup Dark Gathering. It definitely gives some "making it up as we go along" vibes but I'm having fun. The art style really makes me feel like I'm watching something from when I was growing up so it feels nostalgic even though it's a recent anime.

I also finally watched Umamusume Beginning of a New Era. It's fucking good. Movies that make you ponder the nature of historical fiction using yuri hype moments.

Gaming

Another day, another eroge vn. I found out about Geminism by chance while looking up a seiyuu's r-18 roles on vndb out of curiosity, and I saw some of the character quotes and was like "well what the fuck is going on here." I think this quote from a vndb review sums it up nicely "It's great if your freak aligns with the creators'". And mine does! I wouldn't say it blew me away at any point but it has that weirdness I like while also having strong enough writing and characters to not be entirely reliant on "look at how weird this is." As always, disclaimer that this is an r-18 game with a lot of content warnings so take care when looking it up.

Touhou 20! ZUN is continuing the trend of being able to unlock customizations as you play which I appreciate. Since these are games where you're expected to start over and play through it multiple times, being able to change things up helps to keep me invested enough to actually try getting an ending rather than going "well I can always read everything on the wiki." I'm hoping to see more Yuiman interacting with the Moriya Shrine girls in print works in the future!

Magilumiere.

I wasn't especially positive when I first spoke about this series but I've come to realize I was still being too soft on it. Our two female leads (if you can even call them that at this point) don't even get to talk to each other in the final chapter. There's a lot that's been said about misogyny in the shounen demographic but what makes Magilumiere more baffling to me than most other shounen manga is that, if you really feel so indifferent towards female characters then surely you could've chosen to write something other than magical girls. Was someone pointing a gun to the author's head or something? Just pick something else.

I think hard pivoting your magical girl series into business man drama should be some sort of crime. Prez-chan even had to detransition before the series ended for some reason just to make extra sure that you wouldn't think this series is about girls or something.

A manga I liked!

I binged the fuck out of 2.5 Dimensional Seduction. This is a raunchy het romcom with harem elements at its core but it's actually so peak. It reminds me of Call of the Night in some ways where the idea of if there's a difference between "romantic love" and "friendship" is under interrogation.

And other than that, I just like to see nerdy girls being good friends and hanging out at comiket together! I've never had so much otaku envy as I did binging this series while seeing summer comiket posts all over twitter. Lily and I might've done a doujin mail order...