stepnix | Reading

alchemicink

Covering several topics this week, including mini reviews of some new manga!

( Read more... )

soc_puppet posting in

anime_manga

Kana Manga is here this time, bringing a manga mini collection!

This bundle includes:

Eden of Witches, volumes 1 thru 6

Leviathan, volumes 1 thru 3

Manhole, volumes 1 thru 3

You can get the entire bundle of manga in PDF form for only $18 USD. Unlike most other Humble Manga Bundles, this one is only available as the full set, so you cannot, for example, buy the first volume of each series for $1 USD.

This bundle supports Book Industry Charitable Foundation, which has helped bookstore and comic book store employees and owners who encounter unexpected financial crises. The Binc Foundation works to keep book people in their homes, in their jobs, and with their families – stabilizing the brick and mortar bookstore community. With some bundles, you can pick which charity you want your donation to go to, but that doesn't seem to be the case with this one. If you scroll down on the right hand side of the Humble Bundle page, you can also find an area where you can adjust how much of your purchase goes to which organization (the charity, the publisher, and Humble Bundle, respectively), with a minimum mandatory amount to Humble Bundle as the host.

This bundle is available for the next 16 days.

stepnix posting in

frillsofjustice

Watch on YouTube

I'd heard that Studio Pierrot was doing a new magical idol anime for the first time in almost twenty years, and then forgot to follow up on it, and then saw that it's on youtube in English now. get hype. It's making some very clear callbacks to Creamy Mami, but the music design honestly reminds me of more modern American cartoons. bee and puppycat. idk. Real interested to see where this goes.

stepnix posting in

anime_manga

Watch on YouTube

alchemicink

This week: Baku saves the cat; Akane meets a rival; and the Voyager crew faces fear itself.

Girl Rules was on a holiday break this week, so I decided I'd watch and review a Voyager episode instead. I've been meaning to get back to my series rewatch, so I'll probably continue to write little reviews for random episodes here and there.

Title quote comes from Voyager.

Spoilers, as always, below:

Kamen Rider Zeztz (episode 30)

( Read more... )

Akane-banashi (episode 2)

( Read more... )

Star Trek Voyager (season 2, episode 23, "The Thaw")

( Read more... )

alchemicink posting in

anime_manga

*if you live in certain countries.

I just wanted to spread the word! (Because I don't know anyone else watching the series) It's currently available to watch in North and Latin America, and I recently saw that it's now available in Australia and New Zealand too.

I think it's also available on Netflix worldwide without the region-locking, but since I don't have Netflix, I appreciate this free alternative to watch.

The official YouTube channel is here. There are different playlists for different language subtitles.

I really enjoyed the first two episodes! I knew nothing about the series beforehand other than it's about rakugo (a kind of comedic storytelling). But I think Akane is a delightful character, the voice acting is top notch, and the animation is lovely so far. (I have a review for the first episode on my journal in this post)

Has anyone here read the manga? Did you enjoy it?

I'll wrap up by linking this ANN article from back in February that mentions the YouTube streaming and includes a trailer for the show.

subversivegrrl posting in

little_details

So, my character gets shot running away and catches several pellets of birdshot in his calf. Post-apocalyse setting, he doesn't have a chance to tend to it right away - can anyone give me a rough estimate of how long it would take before he would develop an infection that could disable him? (Fever, altered mental state.)

Thanks in advance for any feedback. I may need to revamp my idea about what kind of injury is going to put him out of commission for several days (he will have access to someone who can remove the pellets and provide reasonable, situation-appropriate medical care.)

Current Mood: curious

snowynight

One cupful of cold boiled rice beaten light with one cupful of milk. Add one tablespoonful of melted butter, half a teaspoonful of soda dissolved in a little of the milk, two eggs well beaten, and enough flour, sifted in with one teaspoonful of cream tartar, to make a thin batter. Beat thoroughly and bake in well-greased waffle-irons. Cream tartar and spices are practically certain to be pure when bought of a druggist instead of a grocer. (Not knocking the groceryman.)

From The Myrtle Reed Cook Book by Myrtle Reed (1916 New York)

From: wikipedia: Myrtle Reed (1874 – 1911) was an American author, poet, journalist, and philanthropist. She wrote a number of bestsellers, including Lavender and Old Lace, Threads of Gray and Gold, A Weaver of Dreams and even published a series of cookbooks under the pseudonym Olive Green.

alchemicink

Enjoyed answering this week's

thefridayfive 😊 It was a mostly quiet week for me, and so much better than all the craziness I had to deal with last week.

1. What did you do on Monday?

Work, as usual. The Board of Education meeting I was gonna listen in on (via Zoom) got canceled, so that gave me time to grab some groceries after work. I know a lot of people hate grocery shopping but I kinda enjoy it. I watched two episodes of Kamen Rider Agito (since Girl Rules, my usual Monday show, was on break this week)

2. What did you do on Tuesday?

Work, as usual. Very uneventful compared to scrambling to finish a big project last week. I cooked a simple little mushroom spaghetti dish for dinner when I got home. (It was delicious) I watched some cooking shows on PBS. And discovered my HVAC unit was messed up again 😩 It was so hot when I went to bed.

3. What did you do on Wednesday?

Work, as usual. Started working ahead on some things so I'll be less stressed next week when it gets busy again. Bought a salad from Bojangles for dinner (so I could save half for lunch Thursday). Came home feeling relieved that my HVAC had been fixed and it was a tolerable temperature inside again. Watched more cooking shows on PBS.

4. What did you do on Thursday?

Work, as usual. Pretty much the same as Wednesday. Briefly dropped by my brother's house in the evening to drop off something. I explained to him the concept of fanfic drabbles 😂 Cooked another batch of the mushroom spaghetti. (Still delicious) Listened to a few podcasts. Got excited about the reveal of this year's upcoming Ultraman series. It looks interesting!

5. What are you going to do today?

I have my first vacation day of the year! 🥳 This rarely happens. I plan to do some gardening stuff, and hopefully lots of writing. I might make egg salad.

This is the exciting life I live 😁

malymin

Been using a new Stardew Planner tool that's got better interior design options than the old one.

My current Switch save is on the Beach Farm map, and I want to lean into the furniture that the Beach Farm's farmhouse starts with:

Single Bed (1)
Floor TV (1)
Oceanic Rug (1)
Basic Window (2)
Artist Bookcase (1)
Birch Table (1)
Birch Bench (1)
Birch Chair (2)
Indoor Palm (2)
Small Plant (1)

The "Artist Bookcase" uses the exact same pink-cream color scheme as the "Birch" furniture, so that's effectively a total of... 4-5 pieces of Birch furniture. Here's the other pieces of furniture with the "birch" palette:

I've already bought a Birch Dresser from the Traveling Cart and a Birch Double Bed from the Desert Trader. I plan to use a Birch End Table or Birch Lamp End Table as a nightstand for the bed. I honestly am not sure ho to incorporate the tea table or breakfast chair into anything... but I have a cat, so of course I will have a cat tree.

tepidsnake

This week's Arcade Archives release is... Konami GT (Konami, 1985)

Arcade Archives (previous-gen consoles)

PSN

Switch

Arcade Archives 2 (current-gen consoles)

PSN

Switch 2

Xbox

Despite the title, only the Japanese version, Konami RF2 - Red Fighter, is included. As explained in two posts by ohfivepro, this game was originally released as a Bubble System game (using Bubble Memory that requires literal heating-up before it starts) before later receiving a faster-loading EPROM release that introduces a few errors due to loading data too fast. While the Bubble System version is currently undumped, It seems that Hamster fixed up the errors in the EPROM version to create a better experience than the one currently available in MAME. The ROM release still has a 'warming up' screen though, and the Preference Settings here allow you to skip this if you like.

Yet another Konami game saved from having its only home port on the Microsoft Game Room! This is a pretty interesting one too, a first-person perspective driving game with impressive scaling and presentation (I'm a big fan of the car hood overlay, a bit Road Blaster-esque) and a good sense of speed to it. You're not worried about your position in the race though, it's more about your fuel gauge which constantly draining and empties even faster if you crash into another car or something on the side of the road and explode. You can top up your fuel gauge by driving into the giant orbs littered across the the course, and you also get a full refill once you reach a checkpoint, so a bit like Full Throttle, you're always given a good chance of clearing the next stage rather than having to rely on being good at the previous one. The steering takes a little getting used to (you might want to try adjusting the analogue settings a little) but it reminds me in a way of the turning controls in Pole Position, and funnily enough, Konami and Namco made a deal to sell the game as a conversion kit for old Pole Position cabs! Quite a fun racer, this one, but don't let the Japanese title fool you, it's definitely not a sequel to Road Fighter (although it totally is).

Now that I think about it, we've had this, Final Lap, Rave Racer, Full Throttle... Arcade racing game fans have been eating pretty well lately. Good, good.

petrea_mitchell posting in

anime_manga

(crossposted from my journal)

I want to get back into posting about the anime I'm watching, especially since I wanted to check out a bunch of things this season.

Snowball Earth looks likely to become the show I keep desperately recommending to my fellow Worldcon members until Hugo nominations close next spring. Episode 1 speedruns an entire mecha show about a teenager with a special gift and his special robot fighting off an alien invasion, until things go disastrously wrong and the protagonist finds himself back on Earth after a very sudden climate change. Worse, he was planning to make up for his social isolation and awkwardness by making a bunch of friends after the final battle, and the population of Earth seems to have dropped precipitously.

It's about 75% comedy, 20% earnest mecha action, 5% horror, and all good so far. It's also like someone saw Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet and set out to prove that the premise had a much better show hiding in it.

Rooster Fighter has a pretty thin premise (tough-guy fighter except he's an actual chicken) and yet it's so well executed that I keep deciding to watch one more episode. At some point I think I'll hit a wall and suddenly not care anymore, but today is not that day.

Daemons of the Shadow Realm has managed to conceal a very important piece of its information about its setting from its trailers, which makes for a pretty big shock in the first episode. Congrats to the marketing department, except had I known that piece of information from the beginning, I would have been more interested. Anyway, the last Arakawa Hiromu adaptation I saw felt meh (Arslan) but this is going very well so far.

Mao is the other big adaptation of a manga by a famous long-running author, and um... if you like Takahashi Rumiko's work, this is definitely another Takahashi Rumiko work. I was not gripped.

Welcome to Demon School, Iruma-kun! season 4 inspired me to finally finish season 3, where I'd gotten bogged down in the Harvest Festival arc. Hoping the Music Festival goes better. So far, so good.

Kujima: Why Sing When You Can Warble? is about a boy who meets a migratory anthropomorphic bird-thing and invites it home to live with him. Mildly heartwarming things ensue. This was billed as a "horror comedy", and I feel like the premiere could have used more of both. OTOH, there is some delightfully demented voice acting. I'm going to give this one one more episode.

Killed Again, Mr. Detective? had an interesting-sounding premise, but it's very, very much a light novel adaptation full of light novel tropes that I'm sick of.

Witch Hat Atelier had an excellent first episode featuring the rare anime fantasy world where it all fits together, unlike the usual visual mishmash. Then episode 2 introduced a few characters I feel like I've seen in a million other school and school-like shows, and I was a lot less excited. I'll see how the rest of the season goes.

petrea_mitchell

I want to get back into posting about the anime I'm watching, especially since I wanted to check out a bunch of things this season.

Snowball Earth looks likely to become the show I keep desperately recommending to my fellow Worldcon members until Hugo nominations close next spring. Episode 1 speedruns an entire mecha show about a teenager with a special gift and his special robot fighting off an alien invasion, until things go disastrously wrong and the protagonist finds himself back on Earth after a very sudden climate change. Worse, he was planning to make up for his social isolation and awkwardness by making a bunch of friends after the final battle, and the population of Earth seems to have dropped precipitously.

It's about 75% comedy, 20% earnest mecha action, 5% horror, and all good so far. It's also like someone saw Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet and set out to prove that the premise had a much better show hiding in it.

Rooster Fighter has a pretty thin premise (tough-guy fighter except he's an actual chicken) and yet it's so well executed that I keep deciding to watch one more episode. At some point I think I'll hit a wall and suddenly not care anymore, but today is not that day.

Daemons of the Shadow Realm has managed to conceal a very important piece of its information about its setting from its trailers, which makes for a pretty big shock in the first episode. Congrats to the marketing department, except had I known that piece of information from the beginning, I would have been more interested. Anyway, the last Arakawa Hiromu adaptation I saw felt meh (Arslan) but this is going very well so far.

Mao is the other big adaptation of a manga by a famous long-running author, and um... if you like Takahashi Rumiko's work, this is definitely another Takahashi Rumiko work. I was not gripped.

Welcome to Demon School, Iruma-kun! season 4 inspired me to finally finish season 3, where I'd gotten bogged down in the Harvest Festival arc. Hoping the Music Festival goes better. So far, so good.

Kujima: Why Sing When You Can Warble? is about a boy who meets a migratory anthropomorphic bird-thing and invites it home to live with him. Mildly heartwarming things ensue. This was billed as a "horror comedy", and I feel like the premiere could have used more of both. OTOH, there is some delightfully demented voice acting. I'm going to give this one one more episode.

Killed Again, Mr. Detective? had an interesting-sounding premise, but it's very, very much a light novel adaptation full of light novel tropes that I'm sick of.

Witch Hat Atelier had an excellent first episode featuring the rare anime fantasy world where it all fits together, unlike the usual visual mishmash. Then episode 2 introduced a few characters I feel like I've seen in a million other school and school-like shows, and I was a lot less excited. I'll see how the rest of the season goes.

elf

I ran a Whole Game Scenario, more than a single session, for the first time in more than 20 years. Maybe 30 years.

...Brindlewood Bay is the first game I've actively wanted to run in decades. Played in someone else's game first to figure out the mechanics, and established that

1) Wow, I did not like how they ran the game
2) No, I mean... they ignored the base starting premise of the game, which is "you are retired old ladies." (They decided you can be retired old men instead. I very much do not like this; retired old men are treated very differently from old ladies. It changes how the cozy aspects of the game works.)
3) Aside from that, did not like the GM's call about what actions we were taking, and didn't like that he pushed us into some actions.
4) It was an entirely new experience for me to think "I could run this better."
5) So the next time one of my groups was kinda between games, I said "I, uh, have been kinda wanting to run a thing..."

( And I stole the plot from The Untamed )

stardust_rifle

This video is utterly incoherent to those of you who don't have Terminal Vkei Brainrot but if you do it's utterly hilarious, I assure you. My only complaint is that I think that the "i fuck like it's for survival" line would have fit Gackt better than what they used.

(i know i still have some vkei followers, and i need all of them to see this video)

tepidsnake

From Fushigi Mahou Fun Fun Pharmacy, it's Potpourri the little witch and her magical friends, Pinch, Laluu, Shibu, Grim, Garu and Rick! A short-form anime series (with 11-minute episodes and the occasional 23-minute special) that originall aired as part of an anime block, Anime Shūken DX! Mi-Pha-Pu, it's an excellent mahō shōjo series with a great protagonist, Potpourri, an energetic girl who learns she can be a witch from Miss Fukiko of the titular pharmacy and gets into all sorts of mishaps and adventures in the Smiling Ginza, with Miss Fukiko keeping an eye on her but only involving herself if Potpourri gets really in over her head. It's brilliant, you should all watch it, and Potpourri's outfit design is absolutely peak, bless her (her mom made her outfit and one episode shows she has an entire drawer of the exact same outfit, good). After watching the full series, of course I had to draw her!

petrea_mitchell

Notes on a theme about admission level naming in this week's inbox.

tresfoyle

In August of 2016, my closeted self and two cis girls aiming for teaching degrees arrived at a small metropolis in Guangdong province that I won't name, to preserve a modicum of anonymity. Our university had a standing arrangement with a man named Mr. Zhou, a Hakka guy who'd made a modest fortune in the American Midwest and, as I eventually learned any Hakka guy who makes a modest fortune far from home has been expected to do since time immemorial, had committed a generous fraction of his wealth to giving his hometown a collective leg up. The nature of the arrangement was straightforward: my university would send a couple of English teaching interns to one particular high school a few hours' bus ride out from the hometown in question, and Tuesdays and Thursdays we would roll out there and provide what scant insight into the English language we could to several dozen elementary schoolers. The remainder of the week, we'd belong to the high school, providing valuable language exposure (one would hope) to several dozen more teenagers, half of them visibly brain-fried by preparation for the college entrance exams.

To be perfectly honest, we were dogshit educators. I don't know if any of those kids came out better prepared for the gaokao after we were done with them. I don't know if anything can truly outfit you for throwing yourself into the open mouth of the technocratic machine designed to judge how much social and intellectual merit your arrangement of biomass has accumulated, aside from being born into money. Knowing full well that we had no idea how to give these kids a meaningful advantage and realizing that we were honestly barely supervised despite the preparatory weeks of this undertaking spent marinating in warnings about how suffocatingly monitored and policed we should expect to be, we decided that at the very least we could give them a chance to catch their breath and fuck around a bit—with a faint veneer of English language learning.

We spent maybe an afternoon every week assembling lesson materials. Teaching ate up no more than two hours or so out of any given workday. We had nothing to grade and nothing to log; we wouldn't have even known where to look. There were papers to write for our nominal bosses on the other side of the planet, but they were scant and frankly required trivial effort.

All this is to say that we spent the next four months with shocking amounts of time to ourselves, limited fluency in Mandarin, Hakka, or Cantonese, relatively few overlapping interests, and a completely foreign city to navigate.

We did a lot of food tourism. ( Read more... )

Current Mood: content
Current Location: The City With Broad Shoulders, Babyyyy

buttonsbeadslace

and the theme of the unit we're currently working through in the book is misinformation and conspiracy theories. Yesterday in class the idea that you have to stand back from the microwave while it's running was mentioned, and just now I was microwaving my dinner and thinking about that. And it hit me that I could present about what microwaves are and why you don't need to be scared of them. I could. Does anyone want me to do that? Do I want to do that? IDK yet. But I could.

stardust_rifle

a funny thing about being a Weird Trans Person is that you wind up bodily-autonomy-pilled to such a degree that you come across as an insane person to anyone else who is not similarly Pilled

April 2026

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Reading

Weekly summary: Apr. 12 - Apr. 18, 2026

Humble Bundle: Kana Manga Mini-Bundle

LuluttoLilly ambush

LuluttoLilly ambush

"when fear tries to hold you hostage, how do you make it let go?" (Weekly TV reviews)

You can watch Akane-banashi on YouTube*

Infection from birdshot?

Weekend Cooking: Rice Waffles

Friday Five answers (4/17/26)

(no subject)

Arcade Archives: Konami GT

Spring premiere thoughts

Spring anime premieres

I ran a game!

And While M's On The Topic of Reccing Things

MS Paint World: Magic, Magic, Come Out

SMOF News, volume 5, issue 34

Common Shaggotry | The ten year noodle quest

We are expected to do another presentation for Spanish class this Thursday

oh he shaved off some of his jawbone and put it in his guitar? interesting use of free will there

April 2026

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