People who get full time jobs stop having 80% of their free time, which is instead sold to capital. They seem boring and focused on work, because work is all they have.
Gosplan14_the_Third
joined 2 years ago
Another month, another time to be exhausted by employment.
Manga
Nothing new! Just slowly reading new chapters of Shibuya Near Family and reading Full Metal Panic! Sigma at a glacial pace.
...but
Manhwa
Villains Are Destined to Die! - finally finding a second korean comic that is not in the wretched long strip format*, and it's a really good one. The isekai is interesting, the game mechanics actually feel like they add to the story instead of being there because gamers. The writing is shockingly excellent, with the story being unpredictable so far, and there is a sense that there something below the surface. Maybe I'll be disappointed yet (probably by the lack of John Browning tbh). but this is one of the best manga (oh wait) I've read in a while.
( * - idk if all the chapters so far are available as comic pages unfortunately)
Anime
Following Gundam G-Spam being mid, I have instead jumped onto two other series: Gundam Unicorn and Gundam SEED. I don't have high expectations, and so far both are... okay.
Dragon Ball Z is getting slow. But it's consistently good so far! Maybe I'll turn sour on it in a hundred episodes. Probably not.
Monogatari, oh boy. The show's source of deserved sordid reputation does rear its ugly head sometimes. Other times, it's an entertaining Shaft show, with all that entails. Bakemonogatari was pretty good, with Hitagi Senjougahara being the standout character, but the Kizumonogatari movies were genuinely very entertaining. Probably because I'm a member of a goth-adjacent subculture and I love vampire slop lol.
Before it released, I joked about CITY: The Animation being Nichijou 2... but it is Nichijou 2. I'll miss the original's characters, but this is very promising, based on episode 1.
You're Under Arrest! continues being shockingly entertaining. The show's main strength is the Patlabor style workplace shenanigans with the ensemble cast, as well as the reoccurring characters, which the author is surprisingly good at not forgetting about. Strike Man is a hyperchad.
Also a few shows I need to watch more of to mini-review.
Western Animation & Live Action
Evil triangle guy is the only thing I knew about Gravity Falls, and I have now reached them. The show is very fun so far. Stan's Quark for zoomer children.
Andor started kinda slow, but the heist episode was fantastic, and the quality is indeed as high as people claim it has. And season 2 is better? I'm looking forward to it. Even though I'm going through it slow, since I mostly watch it when it's pretty late and I don't have the energy to stay up that much anymore.
Motorsports are the most reactionary even if just because of the high cost of even participating. Alternatively, golf, I suppose.
Football (soccer) is by far the most proletarian, even if commercialization has been very successful in the last 25 years.
Average westerner in 2025.
Resist the politics of privatization and decay.
Too late. Railways have been converted to a public-private partnership in the 90s, and are trying to get broken up into a competitive market these days anyway, and local public transportation is also run by public-private companies. In the countryside, it's usually managed by a private company in the first place, often organized in local organizations of several firms that offer the same fares - which usually has hard borders and can for example lead to villages next to each other having a 5 h connection time through railways, which don't follow these area bounds.
The Nürnberg zones
The VGN has the benefit of being yuge at least.
I think Brandenburg's is the whole state + Berlin. So that's even better.
Not like the Deutschlandticket has any real future unfortunately. Gotta see if it at least survives the Merz government.
As for DB - the ICE are horrible when it comes to reliability, but I found the regional trains actually mostly pretty good. Even if they have the tendency to be kinda dirty and always have broken toilets.
The Acguy, of course.
Let me guess, communist boomers (don't ask their views on anything from vaccination to LGBT rights), fashy middle aged people, very fashy youths that like libertarian economics.
Having a bad mental health day, and then a broccolihead almost slams at me full speed on an e-scooter and yells at me.
Imagine the ENTIRE Western world now being nostalgic for 2012/2013?
Aren't the libs?
And I suppose it's going to be pretty good for SRW!
Another W for After War Gundam X tbh
The confrontation between Machu and Nyaan ended up being kind of a nothinburger, and Machu easily succeeded in awakening Lalah. So what did that do? As we discovered later in the episode, something. Maybe the third impact again. We can never have enough of those, I suppose.
Enter Char.
The final confrontation with Kycilia happening on a theatre stage was a forceful, but still pretty good visual symbolism. As they have their talk, the play is crashed by the MCs of the show, who take the wheel in the usual search of Mr. Walking Plot Device, who sheepdogged them back into Lalah's presence. Kycilia gets unceremoniously dispatched as not relevant anymore to the plot, and both Chekov's guns go off, not at who'd you'd expect.
Char getting subconsciously magically dressed into his uniform by Lalah was utterly hilarious and blatantly a "hey guys its me, the guy from the merch" moment.
And while the battle outside rages on, we discover - Mr. Walking Plot Device is... from the UC, and might be, if I interpreted the scene correctly, Amuro Ray - here to destroy the G-Spam timeline.
Queue the late 80s Album Oriented Rock / Synthpop blend, it's Beyond the Time time, and time to bring back the RX-78-2 to the fight for the cool of it. Gonna buy the merch yet?
My cynical commentary aside
Any thoughts on the episode? I liked most of it, beyond the quick dressup scene I mocked and the finale. Lalah as a world ending threat (or is she? that's actually a question that remains unanswered and is interpreted differently by characters!) was probably an inevitable plot development, in a society that knows only the apocalypse and status quo (I'm talking to you liberals), and Char vs Machu vs Nyaan could have been a decent final battle for it.
However, the ending was just awful imo. If that is Amuro in the graffiti man's soul, or inside that Gundam, then any conflicts from the G-Spam universe become completely meaningless.
It all becomes background noise to Amuro vs Char, because Tomino wrote so in 1979 and 1988.
24
More time passed since the last good non-Gundam Mechanime than between it and the construction of the pyramids
(upload.wikimedia.org)
Think about it...
Jokes aside, it's sad how the genre has outright gone the way of the Dodo since like 2009.
...is basically the backstory to Star Trek, but worse?
Going from the Season 2 shenanigans, continuing on the "love is the answer" themes. I understand what it was going for as a movie, and pulled it off kinda competently.
The ending was frankly weird, with Setsuna going all Mass Effect 3 ending to end the conflict out of nowhere. But I did like the portrayal of the aliens themselves. An unknowable entity you might not even be able to communicate with, not to mention know their intentions. You know what this reminds me of? Oh wait I already mentioned that series in the first sentence.
Overall, a good Gundam AU, that failed to live up to its heights from Season 1. Fantastic music though. It made me go down a kick of 2000s Japanese Alt Rock.
Antideutsche plotting to make me laugh my ass off in public during my break smh
Manga
I've been reading Full Metal Panic: Sigma, while watching The Second Raid alongside it. It's interesting, considering it has some differences from the anime. Some for good, others for worse. I prefer the Anime, but the Manga is good too.
The other two manga I've been following, The Lies of Sheriff Evans: Dead or Love and Shibuya Near Family are both still fun.
Anime:
I've recently watched Gundam 00 - I wrote more about that here.
Tokimeki Tonight is still a fun show when it comes to the wacky comedy and artsy backgrounds.
Ranma 1/2 (1989) - Rumiko Takahashi's writing is consistently entertaining, and over a dozen episodes in, it keeps delivering. Will the show be able to keep up? I hope so!
Another entertaining show is You're Under Arrest!. Is it copaganda? Yes. Has a certain aspect of the show aged poorly? Also yes. What the show excels in, are the villains of the week. Strike Man will be living in my head rent free for a bit, I suppose.
Dragon Ball Z is peak, over 60 episodes in.
**Western Animation & Live Action **
I'm still watching Gravity Falls, and it's good, if formulaic. Apparently people dislike Mabel and like Dipper? Because so far it's the exact opposite for me lol.
Also, I started Andor. I like it so far, but it's clearly still cooking at this stage.
It also feels like these things are making me more musically illiterate.
You see enough Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Imaginal Discs and the twenty yearly Trhä albums as super highly praised and something every music nerd should listen to, and forget what kind of music most people actually like... which if you go by the spotify charts, is a lot of slop! And if you go by the radio, it's mostly the same stuff since 1995.
The show offers you a disapproving commentary on the War on Terror, liberal technocratic fantasies, and even accidentally recognizes that the bourgeois state itself is one of the biggest obstacles in the liberal one world fantasies that were popular at the time this show aired.
And predictably retreats into hope and despair that this is all caused by a lack of good morals on the part of the rulers. Because if you did that, you'd get something oddly similar to the backstory of Star Trek... and now, but nicer. Literally nothing changes, but it feels good!
Light of the world, shine on me! Love is the Answer! - as always.
And good lord there is a lot of love. This show goes really overboard on the romance melodrama in season 2. Without giving one to the MC, despite the obvious candidate of Princess Marina Ismail. Guess he can't be the man, the legend, Colasour the Indestructible.
Season 1 was the strongest, when it was about geopolitical blocs trying to crush an insurgency that happened to be the main characters of the show. Season 2 retreated hard into totally not newtype mysticism - as can be expected from Gundam really... I need to rewatch After War Gundam X.
What this show was really strong in were the visuals, especially in Season 1, and the music. The soundtrack is composed by Kenji Kawai, and featuring excellent OP and ED themes. Such as the OP2, sung by Tomoko Kawase - one of the Japanese artists I consistently get impressed by - plus Pulse by the Back Horn (containing ED1) is a really good album.
As close as this show was to jumping the shark, it never really did (in the movie? I haven't watched it yet, but thanks to Super Robot Wars I know what it's about lol). The show is just very, very competently made. At the very end of Mecha's presence as a TV anime staple.
Is this show good? Yeah.
Does it have good politics? They're very lib lol, though much more interesting than I expected.
What is this show really? Full Metal Panic, but without the comedy + Gundam Wing
Bonus: A random comment I found on r/gundam
view more: next ›
https://hto.to/series/131766/villains-are-destined-to-die-official-print
behold!