Hmm...

Anime

So with my mom I recently-ish finished Hitoribocchi no Marumaruseikatsu, it's a top-tier banger that I highly recommend; and we also finished the chibi-style Barakamon specials, which were decent but far from great.

With mom I'm still watching Minami-ke: Okawari, Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water, the Ranma 1/2 reboot, The Boondocks, and Cells at Work: Code Black; by myself I've still been watching Cardcaptor Sakura: Clear Card, but I'm putting that one on hold for a few weeks.

Lupin III Part 2 and Samurai Champloo are some more things I'm watching with the family, but we haven't actually watched them for over a month now, so.

On my recent flight to Mni Sota Makoce I watched an episode of Maison Ikkoku I'd downloaded onto my phone. For some reason I was just hankering for that in particular as IFE. Maison Ikkoku honestly is a pretty underrated show, I'd say, given how mega-popular the other Rumiko Takahashi anime are. I have to wonder why, really... Maybe when there's no fantastical elements and the characters are all older than 19, it's harder to sell people on it.

I also tried watching an episode of Bakugan Battle Brawlers dubbed into Norwegian during the flight, but I stopped it midway through. The dub was a little interesting, but not interesting enough to watch a full episode — it's a low-quality dub for a low-quality show that was made to peddle plastic toys. As far as CCG anime go I honestly prefer Dinosaur King.

In the nights before the big flight, I knocked a few things off my planning list. These were mainly things I'd already seen one episode of but didn't reach any final verdict about.

Are You Lost? — I knew this one was mediocre and described as "ecchi" before I started watching, so I figured I knew what I was getting into, but apparently I underestimated just how boring it would be and just how much the "figure-emphasizing shots" would bother me. I was hoping this show would be better, since the premise of teen girls learning to survive on a deserted island sounded fun, and the episodes are only 13 minutes long... Alas, it would seem that sometimes dead doves should not be eaten. C'est la vie !

Mitsudomoe — I wanted to like this one, because it's got a fun style and a catchy opening and seems to be well-liked, however in practice it's just too gross and crass for me. Don't ask me why the snot joke in Shikanoko Nokonoko Koshitantan didn't bother me, but the one in Mitsudomoe made me say "no thanks" — sometimes that's just how these things go.

Love Live! School Idol Project — I've got really good feelings about this one. I haven't seen a lot of idol anime, so the sudden switches to 3D CGI are still a bit jarring, but Love Live clearly has good heart to it, it's got likeable characters, there is some occasional "cringe" but not really enough to get to me. So I'd say I'm definitely looking forward to seeing how the story of μ's unfolds, it looks like it's going to be very heartwarming and sweet. Love Live is incidentally a show I only wanted to try in the first place because I once had a crush on someone who liked it, in fact before I learned that girl's name I just called her "Love Live" in my head because of the pins on her backpack... That crush would soon fade, but I still wonder from time to time if she's doing well.

Sketchbook ~full color's~ — I started and didn't finish the first episode. Not because I didn't like it, mind you, but because I figured ma wouldn't want to miss out on this one. This show seems very sweet and cozy, it looks like it's basically peak iyashikei — and I would describe myself as by all means a decently big fan of a certain other iyashikei anime show about a group of teenage artists, so if this is anything like that...

Manga

In terms of manga, I installed an app called Mihon onto my phone that lets me download manga from Mangadex and stuff.

So thanks to that I got to read a little Tropical Rouge Pretty Cure in Norwegian during the flight. I frankly didn't enjoy that manga very much, but I'm still thankful for the efforts of the fan-translators who posted it. It seems like it wasn't actually the full first chapter, though, it seemed like it was just a few pages from the middle of the manga that were mistakenly listed as the first chapter. So I didn't really have any reference for who the characters were, or what they were talking about, or why I should care about them, and I think that was maybe dragging down my enjoyment quite a bit.

PreCure generally seems pretty hit-or-miss, though, since I tried watching both Smile PreCure and didn't care for it, and later I saw Futari wa Pretty Cure and enjoyed it actually quite a bit.

Still, I think it's very interesting that there is this Mangadex translation group "Glittergutta" who translated parts of Tropical Rouge and Delicious Party Pretty Cure into Norwegian — the group's name means "The Glitter Boys" in reference to Glitter Force, the Saban adaptation of Smile PreCure and DokiDoki! PreCure for Western audiences. So I have to wonder who these two guys are, what their background is for how they ended up becoming such big fans of Glitter Force slash PreCure that they'd try translating the manga into their native language for themselves. The only translations they ever made were all posted three years ago, though, so I doubt they'll be returning to bring us more Norwegian PreCure any time soon, unfortunately.

Anyways, also on the flight I started reading Sailor Moon in Esperanto using the same app, which I have continued reading after arriving in Mni Sota Makoce. Compared to Norwegian PreCure, Esperanto Sailor Moon is a much more substantial translation covering the first two volumes of the manga, and it is an absolute labor of love that's clearly had a lot of effort put into it. I wanted to try reading Esperanto Sailor Moon basically because I wanted to see if, given that I've already seen much of the Sailor Moon anime, and given the general pros of comics/manga for language learning, and given all the familiar vocabulary of Esperanto, and my previous experiences with "trying" to learn la lingvo internacia, that I'd basically be able to pick the language up just by reading it... And so far the answer is, yeah, to some extent. I ended up downloading an Esperanto dictionary onto my phone to check the words I really couldn't seem to figure out, but I'm trying to avoid checking dictionaries to the extent possible.

With my mom I've incidentally been reading the Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken manga. It's good to see those characters again, but it's also not too surprising that a story about animation works better in animation...

Earlier today I got a volume of The Demon Girl Next Door from a used book store that was also selling, somewhat ironically, the selected works of Lenin for $300... That aside, there were honestly a lot of other interesting things in the manga section at that book store, but with only so much room in our luggage and only so much time to look around, I guess things like Toilet Bound Hanako-kun will just have to wait.

In any case, I didn't realize until I actually cracked it open that The Demon Girl Next Door was originally a yonkoma. That format has been kind of hit-or-miss for me, but so far Demon Girl has been pretty nice as far as yonkoma go. Shamiko and Momo are cute together as always, seeing these "mortal enemies" end up acting like basically a couple. "Don't give up, Shamiko!"

Last but certainly not least, I recently got the first volume of Welcome to the NHK as a gift. It sounded a bit "rough around the edges" based on the plot description I read, so I wasn't sure how I'd feel about it, but I knew that it was popular, that it's seen as a masterpiece that comments on various societal issues, so I figured I'd give it a shot. And a story about someone living on the fringes of society — a drug-addicted recluse with paranoid delusions and stuff — sounded very interesting to me anyways.

This being said, this is roughly how Welcome to the NHK has been to read thus far:

Chapter 1 - Welcome to the Project: "Yeah, this is more or less what I was expecting. It's gross at times but it's got me interested in where the story goes from here."

Chapter 2 - Welcome to the Lolita: "Welp, that title doesn't exactly give me good expec— THIIIIRTY FUUUUCKING GIIIIGABYTES, JEEEESUS CHRIIIIIST."

...So, you know, once I'm back home I'll finish reading that volume, but it certainly seems like it's going to be a bit of a rough read to say the least.