#but the other ones turned out EVEN SHITTER QUALITY THAN THIS

[shortnsweetbf]

please please please, sabrina carpenter

[nemirambles]

Fraymakers: Nearly a Year Later

Hello everyone, I just wanna lay some groundwork. I’m an ex-SSF2 modder, SSF2 being Super Smash Flash 2. I used to go under the handle “Foxx”. That’s with two x’s by the way. A lot of my mods are more or less kinda just lost media now. I used to work on SSF2 Delta but left on my own volition due to disagreements with some of the leads. I'm most notably known for making cosmetic related mods for the competitive community. I started messing around with the game when I was maybe 12 or so? I’ve made a lot and I’ve seen a lot in that time and if there are any SSF2 devs or old acquaintances that knew me that’re reading this now, sorry. I was a shitter then but I'm better now and will promise to continue to keep improving myself. When I write this essay, I’m saying this as someone who’s loved modding the game, playing with others and looking back at old community drama somewhat fondly.

When I saw Fraymakers be initially revealed, I was really excited to see a new project from McCleod and for it to be one that seemed to be fully embracing the modding scene that they’ve cultivated over the years. It was finally gonna be this huge breakthrough for this team that had basically been going under appreciated and recognized for all the work they put into SSF2. The Kickstarter showed off 6 characters, assists, training mode hitboxes, stage hazards, some single player content, rollback netcode and a bit more. With the way the trailer was edited, it appeared that most things shown off were either done or close to being completed. There was sparse content sure, but nothing that looked unfinished. No sketched animations, hazards seemed to be working, the UI was functional, the game seemed like it was on a good path.

Two years later, it was released on Steam in early access and I don’t think I’ve ever been any more disappointed playing a game. I know that it’s an early access but when the game can’t even run at 60FPS for some mysterious reason, something is probably wrong. Rollback was shitty, meaning that most people had to just play on delay netcode. Which is kinda shitty in of itself, but the quickplay function just automatically turned rollback on, meaning that you’d be forced to play with it. This basically ensured that quickmatch was more or less dead on arrival. There was a built in online stress test to see if you’d be good for online play and I just wanna say that my relatively new Steam Deck struggled to get a good online stress test score on max quality. For a 2D sprite based game. Training mode was pretty much nothing. There was no hitbox viewer. Several characters had unfinished animations. You couldn’t play time matches. You couldn’t really change any significant match settings. Only one stage had hazards, the hazards in question being two extra platforms under the stage and the UI was abysmal. That last part isn’t like a *real* huge issue I just felt like pointing out how utterly terrible the UI design is here.

This left everyone with 4 characters that’re at varying levels of unfinished or unpolished, 5 stages and a good chunk of assists that sorta feel more like cute gimmicks than anything else. The only other thing was the workshop content but we’ll talk about that later. But that was at launch, of course it was going to be messy. But it’s been 10 months since then! Almost an entire year! Surely it’s gotten better, right?

It Did Not Get Better

Well since then we’ve gotten several quality of life updates, fixes to the input system, some optimization improvements, several finished animations, some online improvements, a new assist and a new character. I might’ve missed a bit here and there but that’s about the sum of it. How did these changes fare? Well they undoubtedly improve the game, for sure. But it’s kinda not enough? I know it’s crazy to say that when we got a new assist and a new character but respectfully, the issue wasn’t the lack of characters as much as it was just the lack of quality surrounding the characters, at least for me. Sure they added like two extra guys but the training mode is still awful, online is still bad (if you can even get a match), some characters are STILL unfinished sprite wise and the game STILL doesn’t have things like time matches. There simply isn't anything to do.

Anything greyed out cannot be selected or toggled.

How about those stage hazards? Well some were shown off in the trailer, seemingly being functional and or finished. Now that the game is out in EA, there's only one stage with hazards. Wanna know what the hazard is? Two extra platforms at the bottom of the stage.

I guess it's now also a good a time as any to mention the absolutely abysmal Kickstarter rewards. Wanna know how much you get for two thousand dollars? You get the game, ONE golden costume, a test build, a DIGITAL artbook, a discord channel, your name in the credits will show that you're angel tier and you'll get some online tags. You also get to play with the devs on their terrible netcode! That might seem like a lot but in reality that's kind of only really three things, the game, a costume and an artbook. Sure you get some fancy stuff by your name in the credits but… y'know I decided to go check this myself to be super sure. Your name doesn't like glow or anything in the credits it just sits in a tier above everything else, which alright, fair enough, but who's gonna be checking that really? Is that really what you want for two thousand?

You could add 5 more characters and people still would pass this by because the general quality of life is still genuinely super shit. Hell, when you change your controller profile in the settings, the controls in the menu don’t even update until after you restart the game. This isn’t even an issue SSF2 had. It doesn’t have controller profiles but it did at least recognize what button did what after having it be set. This might seem harsh but this game is 20 whole ass dollars. You might be ready to say “oh but they’re packaging a game creation tool with this, that’s where part of the money is going as well”. We will get to that just give me a moment. First I wanna ask the question of who this game is even for.

Audience?

Really, I’m genuinely asking. Why would you play Fraymakers? For the gameplay? I mean it’s more or less just SSF2 with assists and those assists aren’t really that fun to play with. They just kinda feel like ways to cheese out stocks. There’s utility ones but… you know nobody’s using those when they can combo into an assist that does damage and kill at like 80 in a game where it’s very easy to rack up damage. The music? It’s amazing but nobody’s playing a game purely for that unless it’s some sort of rhythm game. Quality of life? This is some of the worst quality of life in a modern fighter. It’s not easy to get matches, it’s already a Discord fighter, and when you DO get matches it’s gonna be a lot of the same. It’s fun but it’s not really fun enough to wanna keep playing it over all the other fighting games or even platform fighters out at the moment. So that leaves the workshop which is cool and all but there’s that Rivals of Aether sized elephant in the room. Sure, Rivals is 10 dollars more than Fraymakers but,

It has players

The modding support for that game is huge

The game is much more complete than Fraymakers

The online is actually good

Rivals workshop completely and utterly decimates this game. Considering Rivals is an actual finished and polished product, it’s just not that fair of a fight. But that’s just how these things go, sometimes you just can’t compete and I don’t think Fraymakers will be able to. The worst part about this is that Fraymakers COULD’VE had a strong audience for it’s modding scenes but do to choices made on McCleod’s end, that potential community was basically kneecapped before this game even existed. That last bit is really important. I’m about to get into some deeper stuff regarding the SSF2 modding scene and how McLeod’s choices with it undoubtedly led to the poor modding scene for Fraymakers.

This Was A Long Time Coming

The SSF2 community and Fraymakers community might as well be 1-1. Well not 1-1 in the sense that SSF2 players play Fray, they don’t, but most Fraymakers players tend to play SSF2. One thing you ought to know about the SSF2 community is that it’s sort of splintered. Not as much as it used to be, but it used to be broken up quite often. This game more or less was the next thing for a lot of us, SSF2 is a flash game that’s limited by it’s engine, even despite the absolute magic these developers have put into it to push it far beyond any other Flash project. Fraymakers was or will hopefully eventually be the next step for the scene and for a lot of us to move forward. While the competitive community may, the modding community definitely will not.

This is some old stuff but a good few years back, McLeodGaming was quite antagonistic towards the SSF2 modding scene. You’d be banned from the Discord if you posted mods there or showed off hitboxes. If you were shown to have leaked content from the unreleased beta build at the time, you’d be banned from online for months, even if you weren’t distributing it. I don’t have the proof of these things anymore but if you ask certain people who were around in 2017/2018, they could likely corroborate, but being a modder would actually decrease your chances of being hired as a developer if you were.

While the SSF2 dev team was hostile as shit to modding, it was at least somewhat justified. I won’t pretend that I wasn’t pretentious when it came to editing the game and I had a good amount of “it’s just that easy” moments and while I was being snobbish and many competitive players and modders alike were also being snobbish, they weren’t totally unfounded. Like sure we made fun of the balance but that wasn’t entirely unfounded. Let’s not forget 9b Zelda, 3.2 Samus, memory leak Lloyd, reworked Sora, Krystal, the terror that used to be Tails and so much more. There was also the matter of people sharing around leaks of the beta build of the game. But this was a very small minority in actuality.

There was still a very large community for this kind of content that was pretty much rejected rather than embraced. So modders went and made their own community. There began this sort of disconnect between the developers and the modbase. Sort of. Some developers were still very receptive and interested in the modding scene, shoutouts to TSON, but it was still largely rejected when it came to official spaces. Some of the higher ups in the modding community started to almost resent the people in charge of SSF2. Creating rifts that might still be there to this day.

I mention all this not to point fingers at anyone in particular or to say that one side was shitty. I think that both kind of were, but that whatever chance Fraymakers had to gain a large modding scene basically went out the goddamn window when just a few years previously they had done everything in their power to keep modded content away from their game. Because there was this anti-mod authority, all the people creating content in SSF2 just… went away from official avenues. FrayTools might as well just be a shitty version of Adobe Flash/Animate. If anyone was going to know how to use it, it would be the people who had spent years putting Vegeta into SSF2. But literally all those people are gone, off in their own spaces. But even beyond that, there’s another thing to keep in mind which is that Fraymakers is directly competing with SSF2. 

Sibling Rivalry

Fraymakers is very similar to Flash 2. I’d even go out and say that Fraymakers probably runs on some refurbished SSF2 engine or at least borrows elements from it. But Fraymakers lacks a lot of the sauce that SSF2 has while also lacking a ton of content. When you make games that are so similar but one has so much more going on compared to the other, it’ll be hard to make people want to throw 20 bucks into a game like Fraymakers. This is ignoring one huge thing though which is that I wouldn’t call Fraymakers a game based around modding. You cannot change anything about the base game itself. You can only add content. You are not modifying anything, you are tacking on free DLC. As far as I can tell, the files for Fraymakers are impossible to get into and any of the talented people from the old days who could’ve figured out ways to break into it are long gone.

On the flip side, SSF2 is a game that is cracked wide open with tons of resources and complete and total freedom.

It isn’t hard to get your hands on the engine and to just kinda start doing shit. It’s annoying to get the process started and you’ll either need to pirate or buy Adobe Animate but boy, if you can’t do some great shit with the game once that’s all been done. There’s not really any reason for those SSF2 modders to come over with that being the case.

So Now What?

Well, I dunno really. I want Fray to succeed but with the lackluster post launch support and SSF2 being there, I find it hard to believe it’ll find true success. It’s retained some players but it seems to have gained basically none and it’s failed to get even half the attention it got at its early access launch since. But that’s the early access launch. There’s still some hope for it to regain relevance when it truly launches but that’s something the future can only tell. In the meantime, I can't really recommend Fray in a good conscience. Not when SSF2 is there on the table and doing pretty much everything better. It sucks but them's the breaks. Hopefully McCleod can turn it around.

[thebluelemontree]

I know GRRM has previously stated that ADwD!Tyrion is at his lowest point, but I find it very hard to see how he will ever redeem himself given what he has done and what he has participated in. Do you believe readers gloss over the tragedies he faces i.e. slavery, the Tysha revelation, and do you see path for redemption?

I think with the fandom in general there does seem to be a proportional relationship to the amount of careful consideration people give their problematic favs versus how little they give to a character that is decidedly not their fav. Full disclosure: Tyrion is not one of my favs. There are moments I don’t like him and I don’t personally connect with him. He’s deliberately written to be someone most readers will wrestle with. Out of all the POVs, he’s probably the most psychologically complex and fraught with a minefield of trauma-induced hot buttons. As we know, profound trauma and horrific family dynamics rarely produce saintly victims who suffer beautifully, quietly, and always behave magnanimously. I am by no means an expert on Tyrion; however, I do know he definitely started out as a good person. Early AGOT Tyrion is a pretty decent fellow who validated Jon’s feelings of anger and resentment and designed a saddle to accommodate Bran’s disability for no other reason than he just empathized with them both. Even later on, he does stand up for Sansa against Joffrey’s cruelty, even though their marriage was a miserable farce and act of war against her family. Sansa seems to bear no personal ill-will toward him despite it. I think we should leave room for the possibility the impression he made with small kindnesses in the beginning could come back around to foster peace and mutual forgiveness between the Starks and Lannisters toward the end. 

But before that he was a sweet, loving kid until he was brutally disabused of the notion that anyone could possibly love him. I can’t imagine anything worse than your own father violently raping by proxy two innocent kids for the crime of his son being happy and believing for one single second that he was loved for himself. He’s experienced a lifetime of continuous physical, sexual, mental, and verbal abuse on top of ableist bigotry and repeated scapegoating that nearly cost him his life more than once. For all his dark gray, unlikable moments, it’s actually kind of a miracle that Tyrion still retains what goodness he does have when he could have been totally fucked up beyond repair, without any pity or compassion left in him, and hating all of humanity with every fiber of his being.   

GRRM does a good job of delivering blow after intensifying blow leading up to the moment he snaps and murders Tywin and Shae.There’s the overwhelming stress of the trial for the regicide he was framed for, one where his guilt and conviction is a foregone conclusion. The public humiliation and betrayal of Shae’s false testimony where his sexuality is served up for mockery. The people of KL are literally bloodthirsty and cheering for his death. There’s the momentary hope and crushing defeat of Oberyn Martell championing him in the trial by combat. Then finally Jaime drops the Tysha bomb. I mean, wow... it’s a lot. It’s totally understandable why he goes to the Hand’s tower to confront his father instead of escaping immediately. Personally, I don’t think he has to be sorry about killing Tywin at all. That pile of excrement had it coming and deserved a painful, ignoble death on the shitter at minimum. Shae is the only one there that has enough mitigating factors to say she definitely didn’t deserve to be strangled to death, though I get how it happened in the heat of the moment under intense mental duress. I think he needs to atone for that one, and I say that as someone who thinks Shae is a callous, conniving, greedy, low-level bloodsucker without any redeeming qualities. Yet, killing either of them, especially Tywin, didn’t bring Tyrion any peace or satisfaction whatsoever. Kinslaying is still up there with the most cursed of transgressions. It’s major part of his spiral into the tormented abyss we see in ADWD.  

It’s been a long time since I read ADWD as it’s not my favorite part of the series, so my memory of all the details is not the best. And like I said, I am not an expert on Tyrion. The general impression I get is that Tyrion thinks that he thinks he hates humanity and he’s finally become the monster everyone believed him to be. So he rages against practically everything and everyone. He certainly harbors a hatred for the people of KL and the sister sitting on the throne. There is a high probability he acts upon those feelings and helps usher in a catastrophic tragedy out of vengeance. Just as an example, he is aware of the wildfire cache sitting under KL and that knowledge can be used in a really bad way. Might be that crossing a point of no return, which may feel glorious in the moment, is ironically the thing that causes him to recoil in horror and regret after the dust settles. Consider Tyrion’s dream about the duality of himself: 

That night Tyrion Lannister dreamed of a battle that turned the hills of Westeros as red as blood. He was in the midst of it, dealing death with an axe as big as he was, fighting side by side with Barristan the Bold and Bittersteel as dragons wheeled across the sky above them. In the dream he had two heads, both noseless. His father led the enemy, so he slew him once again. Then he killed his brother, Jaime, hacking at his face until it was a red ruin, laughing every time he struck a blow. Only when the fight was finished did he realize that his second head was weeping.

If the two heads are both noseless, then they are both present day Tyrion. There are two sides of him right now that are equally capable of reveling in bloody vengeance and weeping for someone he still loves even though they wounded him deeply. 

Then what? Well, the thing about hitting your lowest point is that you can either dwell there until you fatally self-destruct or you can find your way back up. Granted, ADWD Tyrion is in a dark place, but there’s still space to get even darker for at least a little while in TWOW. It is possible Tyrion spends the rest of his life atoning for his worst actions during this period, using his intellectual gifts (even the parts that are Tywin writ small) to serve the needs of the people he has harmed. And it does make good story sense for someone who grew to hate humanity for very understandable reasons still found it in himself to care about it enough to save it. Even sacrifice himself for it if necessary since there’s a strong possibility he is a dragon rider. Since all signs seem to point to him ultimately playing a heroic role against the Others, we can rule out the idea that he just says good riddance to bad rubbish and laughs while the world ends. That has to mean something, right? 

There is always a path for redemption for anyone who sees the wrong of what they’ve done, has heartfelt remorse, and commits themselves to meaningful and lasting change. It’s not really about forgiveness at all, although that sometimes happens alongside redemption and it’s certainly easier for people to forgive once they see change. Redemption is work the character must do themselves for the right reasons. It’s not a status granted to them by other people. In fact, it’s probably more sincere when someone decides to do right anyway even if no one ever thinks better of them. If Tyrion (or any other character) is unforgivable to you, then the best worst thing that could happen is that they have to live a long life and spend all of it repaying their karmic debt. Even if he’s not my fav or your fav, a lot of people out there still do relate to him and the things he’s been through. A lot of people are not okay and not good victims from the trauma they’ve suffered. Fiction with redemption that is possible for anyone gives people hope that they could be better too, and there’s no other instance in the books that makes me think GRRM is cynical about redemption. The only way redemption isn’t happening for Tyrion is if he choses not pursue it. 

[samantha7337]

DATING GEORGE WEASLEY WOULD INCLUDE: ◾ Let’s get something super clear here, George is the more sensitive of the twins, which he never forgets thanks to his fabulous twin Fred who continuously brings it up. ◾ You’re either a companion within regards to their ideas for pranks or just in the prank itself, there is simply no in between. They’ve either slyly convinced you to fully commit to their life of cheeky crime or you’ve made it clear to them that you’re not willing to be completely responsible. And you know what? George and Fred love you for it. ◾ Unfortunately, you had to go through a ‘trial period’ at first with Fred, to ensure that you were good enough for his brother; which George, in the slightest bit, wasn’t too keen on, because he didn’t want you scared off and found it all a bit unnecessary. ◾ But you managed to pass, so it’s all just left in the past. ◾ Consistent teasing from Fred about how the both of you are so in love. ◾ “Oi, get a room not all of us can handle your love bird syndrome.” ◾ “Awe looks at the two love birds!” ◾ “You know Georgie, (Y/N)-” ◾ “Shut your mouth Fred, before I end you!” ◾ Always having thought that George was the more attractive of the twins. ◾ George having an immense soft spot for you, which Fred never misses the opportunity to point out lavishly. ◾ Protective asf George. ◾ Like, you won’t get to do anything that puts you even in the slightest of dangers. ◾ The shitter thing is that Fred will back him up 110%. ◾ But you somehow do it anyways, which means George ain’t too happy. ◾ Due to George being more emotional than Fred, I can definitely see him ranting to you about Umbridge or how Malfoy always puts his family down. You and Fred are usually the only ones able to calm him down so he won’t commit murder or any other unspeakable act. ◾ Sending notes in class, which leads the pair of you into detention, but George already had detention anyways. ◾ He’s excited about detention with you because he get’s to spend more time with you. ◾ When he get’s in detention you tend to get annoyed at him as you guys don’t always get to spend much time with each other alone, - especially if you’re in another house -. ◾ George won’t give a single damn about your blood status or what house you’re in, he cares about you for the person that you are and what brilliant qualities and quirks you have. ◾ With that noted, if you’re in another house, he’s gonna sneak you into the Gryffindor common room no matter how much you reprimand him. ◾ You sneak him into yours. ◾ Pranking each other lightly ( you not so much bc George hates making you upset). fucking softie. ◾ Fred and George learning the hard way not to prank you so much or too badly or at all really. ◾ Tender forehead kisses and long, warm cuddles that extend for hours on end. ◾ George is just a mega dork around you. ◾ Intertwined fingers and walks in the autumn leaves. ◾ Eyes lighting up with brilliant ideas. ◾ Silent communication, just a look in each others eyes will do. ◾ You’re stuck with Fred now too. Sorry it’s in their contract. ◾ The dork will definitely boop your nose if you’re sad or angry. ◾ He’s always making you smile, laugh and blush, which is just the way he likes it. ◾ Hates it when you’re in a bad mood or sad, he’ll do anything to get that grin back on your face. ◾ In private George will totally say more mushy stuff, he already get’s teased enough from Fred as it is. ◾ The pair of you never shut up about each other, everyone’s sick of it now. ◾ He twirls the end of your hair around his fingers, breathing about how soft and perfect it is. ◾ He’s romantic af. ◾ This boy will protect you and give you everything, okay? ◾ Deep meaningful hugs. BEAR HUGS! ◾ Dates that’re usually simple, but he always finds a way to make them sooo special so you won’t forget. ◾ Pretends to forget important dates with you so that he can get a little rise out of you before he kisses your nose or your mouth and tells you to shut up because he’s not that much of a brain dead git to forget your anniversary. ◾

Unlimited comfort. ◾ Being protective of him. ◾ Him throwing major hands when a guy flirts with you or when anyone hurts you. ◾ Inviting you to The Burrow every holiday. ◾ His family, - especially his parents -, loving you totally. You’ve suddenly been adopted by them without any consent, but you don’t mind tbh. ◾ Molly and Arthur constantly ask about you, they’ve sent you a Weasely sweater, but you still steal George’s. ◾ Helping Arthur understand muggle stuff and concepts better. ◾ George and Fred switching places, but it never fools you. Originally you got cross, but then began playing with them. ◾ Him and his family loving you for you and not focusing on your gender, race, sexuality, beliefs, etc. They’re always so accepting of you that it makes you sob. ◾ Sneaking into his room late at night when staying at The Burrow just for cuddles. Fred doesn’t mind as long as he can tease the shit out of you guys and also that there’s no funny business. ◾ Him giving you free stuff from his shop, but you insist on paying him back with kisses. ◾ “I think I’m going to spew.” ◾ “Oh come on, Freddie! You love a bit of romance around.” ◾ “Yeah, but not when your tongues down (Y/N)’s throat, you git.” ◾ The banter is real mate. ◾ George being really intelligent, which surprises you but he helps you with your homework constantly. ◾ Helping him at the shop. more like distracting. ◾ Jump scaring tf out of you. ◾ Taking care of one another and treating each other with the utmost respect and love. ◾ You’ve definitely been caught by everyone at The Burrow when making out. The worst has to be Molly, she’ll give a long lecture that embarrasses the pair of you. ◾ When you cuddle with George in his room, Fred’s got to be clingy and join in. ◾ George buying you sweets. ◾ Breathy sweet nothings and husky morning voices. ◾ Honestly every day you wake up at The Burrow, George will always point out how adorable and sleepy you are. ◾ Fred and George teach you Quidditch, you’re not very good at it yet, which Fred teases you about, but George is always encouraging you. ◾ An immense about of fluff and happiness. ◾ Wiping away your tears and kissing it better. ◾ Being picked up and thrown over his shoulder bc it’s just George. ◾ Being Ginny’s role model, she loves you so much and everyone is so happy about it. ◾ George just gushes over you all of the time. ◾ Moving in with the twins in the small apartment above their joke shop. ◾ A cheeky, “Morning,” and wink from Fred every time you come out of your bedroom followed by George with messy hair and love bites. ◾ Aimless invisible patterns drawn on the skin which make you both shiver in delight. ◾ Deep loving kisses that can turn passionate and rough. ◾ Being obsessed with how he smells, and vice versa. ◾ Pulling on George’s cheeks and cooing to him like a little kid whenever he achieves something, it makes Fred and him laugh, though it irks him slightly. ◾ He’s literally your sunshine. ◾ You’re obsessed with the color of his hair, constantly playing with it whether his heads in your lap or you’re sitting on his lap. ◾ Major eye contact; if you were nervous about it originally, he got you comfortable with it. ◾ Interlocked fingers and soft eye contact during intimate moments. ◾ Tickle attacks. ◾ Peppered kisses. ◾ He’ll share his food with you, what a miracle! ◾ Always making sure that you’re taking care of each other. ◾ Taking care of each other when you’re both sick. ◾ Visiting each other when you’re sick at school. ◾ He loves it when you come to him about everything first, unless he get’s stumped on what to do. But him and Fred are your biggest cheerleaders, okay? ◾ He’s a sucker for neck kisses and biting or nails softly scratching down his back or arms. ◾ He loves it when you always come first. ◾ He’s super attentive with you. ◾ He can be sub or dom. ◾ Seriously, he’s brilliant at everything which makes your head spin. ◾ He speaks with his words a lot though his actions can be louder, because he’ll do things for/to you that he’d never do for/to

anyone else. ◾ Genuinely dying of embarrassment whenever George and Fred find out something embarrassing about you. ◾ Not always quite during sex, but he can’t help it. ◾ He always loves a challenge, so if you’re at The Burrow and want that sort of intimate alone time, he’ll make is so hard for you to be quiet, which you’re so annoyed at him about later, but it wears off bc it was worth it. ◾ Literally shows you off to everyone. He’d never hide you or make you feel like he’s embarrassed to be with you. ◾ If you’re introverted, he’ll do his best to understand and do things that you enjoy, though it may take time for him to understand why you need so much alone time, but he’ll respect it. And if you’re extroverted, he’ll be happy too, loving to do everything with you. If you’re in the middle and an ambivert, a good mix will do! ◾ If anyone upsets you, that’s their target for cruel pranks for the rest of the year.

[trashcanband4]

Therapy Sessions Ch. 2

Chapter 1

Pairing: NeganxOc. Setting: The Sanctuary. Warnings: None other than Negan being OOC. Summary: Negan begins attempting to get to know the OC (Kelly.).

The next day she woke up to an empty bed and a note left on the dining table. As she picked it up she read aloud, “You are to stay here until I return. Make yourself at home but touch my stash of food and you will be sorry.” She scoffed and tossed the note back on the table.

“Right, so what am I supposed to do here all day?” As she looked around the room she spotted a few books, a small stereo and some CD’s on a shelf sitting to the right of the door, but none of them peaked her interest. Finally she popped a cd into the stereo and started working out.

She had just finished doing cool down stretches when Negan walked in. Lucille propped up on his shoulder. “Good morning.” Negan told her seeing that she wasn’t still in bed like he expected she’d be given the events of the previous night and how late they went to sleep. If he had the chance to sleep in he’d definitely take it, but he had a community to run.

“Mornin’.” She answered as she sat down on the foot of the bed, leaving the dining chairs at the table for Negan. He walked into the room and leaned the sparkling clean Lucille against the bookshelf by the door then sat down in the dining chair crossing his legs at the knees.

“So what’s in store for me today?” she asked bringing her socked feet up onto the bed to sit cross-legged.

“You and I have the rest of the day together and I intend on spending every second of it picking at your dead little soul.” He replied as he sat down in the armchair.

“Why?” she asked, emotionlessly, as usual.

“Because what’s dead doesn’t stay dead these days.” He replied with a cocky smile.

“You think you can bring me back to life?” she asked, her voice turning hard as she crossed her arms over her chest. She wanted to tell him that the walls she had built up, walls constructed from the fallen bodies of her loved ones, were impossible to tear down. However she kept her mouth shut, because telling him that would be letting him in and that wasn’t going to happen.

“I’m going to try.” He answered finding it ironic that while he was going to attempt to fix her, Daryl was being held in a tiny room in which Negan intended on breaking the man.

“Good luck with that.” She shrugged and dropped her arms from across her chest.

“Tell me about who you were before the world got flushed down the shitter.” He told her as he uncrossed his legs and leaned forward placing his elbows on his knees.

“And if I don’t want to?” she asked flatly.

“Then I’ll ask you to tell me what you did for a living.” He countered.

“And if I say that I don’t want to answer that question either?” she asked already getting tired of him and his pointless questions.

“Then I’ll tell you that I am being very generous keeping you in here with me. I could easily put you in the room next to Daryl’s where you can listen to him screaming and crying as fucking Easy Street play’s on loop and you will be fed the same shitty as fuck dog food sandwiches as him.” He told her as his face turned cold and his eyes glaring.

She sighed and crossed her arms over her chest again. “Fine, before the dead came back to eat the living, I was a wife and mother. I was chasing two kids around a three bedroom house, changing diapers and getting baby food thrown in my face. My husband worked two jobs to make ends meet. Things were hard, but I wouldn’t and couldn’t have asked for a better family.”

“Do you have children back at Alexandria?” he asked and she simply shook her head no. “What happened to them?”

“Near the beginning my youngest was taken from me by a virus that spread through our community like wildfire. We didn’t have the resources to handle it. The poor baby didn’t stand a chance. He’d always had a weak immune system. He was three.” She answered not looking at Negan, but at her hands in her lap as she picked at her cuticles. “My oldest, was taken from me by some ass holes that called themselves the wolves. I was helping stock the pantry and my husband was out on a supply run when they attacked. She was home alone. The wolves slit her throat.” She glanced up at Negan then back down to her hands. “She was nine.”

“So is that when you started shutting down?” he asked quietly.

“No, I felt every single bit of that shit.” She answered honestly.

“You mentioned a husband. He dead now?” Negan pressed.

“After we lost our son things between us became…strained. We only stayed together because of our daughter. So when we lost her-” she cut herself off not wanting to elaborate too much. “Let’s just say things got really, really ugly. He eventually left the community. I don’t know where he went and I don’t care to.” The whole time she answered his questions her voice stayed the same, flat, uncaring tone as usual.

“Damn… that all sucks.” he sighed and rubbed at his chin.

“The world sucks now.” She shrugged one shoulder.

“You’re not wrong about that.” He replied as he leaned back in the chair again and brought his booted foot up to rest on his knee.“Let’s lighten things up a bit.” He said and Kelly stopped picking at her cuticles. “Coffee or tea?”

“French Vanilla chai tea.” She answered quickly.

“I’m a black coffee guy myself. What TV shows were you into before?” he told her information about himself even though she didn’t ask.

“The Big Bang Theory, South Park and as embarrassing as it is to admit, The Bold and The Beautiful.” She answered.

“The Bold and The Beautiful was that shitty soap opera right?” he asked and she nodded. “I wasn’t much into tv myself. Did you have a celebrity crush?” He picked up a baseball that was on the floor next to the dining chair and started tossing it in the air and catching it.

“It was always a tie between Channing Tatum and Jensen Ackels.” She answered and for the first time Negan heard what he thought was a smile in her voice.

“Seriously, Jensen Ackles?” he asked as he stopped tossing the ball and cocked a brow at her.

“Hey, dude was hot as hell.” She argued with a small smile that was no where near reaching her eyes, but it was a start. “Just saying.”

“You know Lucille used to tell me that Jensen reminded her of me what I was younger.” He commented quirking Kelly’s interest for the first time.

“You’re bat talks to you?” she asked and he knew she meant it sarcastically but the tone wasn’t there.

“Lucille was my wife. My real wife… before all of this.” He explained and Kelly just made an “Ah” face. “Dog or Cat?” he asked going back to this or that questions.

“Dog, you?” she asked figuring that if he was going to get to know her and keep her in his room for the foreseeable future, she should start getting to know him too.

“Dog. Cats are too fuckin’ moody.” He replied. “Toast or eggs?”

“Eggs.” She answered then motioned for him to answer. He smirked a little, thinking it a good thing that she wanted him to answer his questions too.

“Toast.” Negan answered than asked, “Cardio or Weights?”

“Cardio. Stamina matters these days.” She answered.

“Weights.” He smirked again.

“Cake or pie?”

“Neither. I don’t do sweets.” She answered.

“What’s the matter with you? Sweets are what make life worth living.” He asked dramatically with a shake of his head.

“I’ve never had a sweet tooth. Even as I kid I didn’t eat a lot of candy.” She said with a shrug.

“So what did you do on your birthday, stick candles in a pot roast?” he asked and she cracked the smallest of smiles.

“I had a cake, I just didn’t eat it.” she answered as she dropped her feet to hang off of the side of the bed, not quite touching the floor. “What about you, cake or pie?”

“Classic apple pie with the sugared lattice on top.” He answered. “So you don’t eat sweets at all, none, ever?” he asked stuck on the sweets thing.

She sighed and tilted her head back, people always had this reaction when she told them that she never ate chewy or hard candies or cake or cookies. “I will eat mint chocolate chip ice cream every other blue moon, but that’s it.”

“Mint chocolate chip? Out of all the awesome ice cream flavors you chose the most disgusting one.”

Kelly just rolled her eyes at him. “Okay so out of all the awesome ice cream flavors what’s your favorite Mr. Judgmental?” she asked sarcastically.

“Butter pecan all the way baby.” He answered with a shit eating grin that showed off his dimples and perfect teeth.

“Now that’s disgusting.” She said with a point at him. “Bath or shower?” she flipped things around and asked him a question. He didn’t seem to notice, too caught up in the conversation.

“Shower.” He answered.

“Same, I never understood how someone could soak in a soup of their own filth.” She added and he smiled at her, thinking the same thing. “Hamburger or taco?”

“Hamburger.” He answered without missing a beat.

“Yeah you look like a hamburger guy.” She said giving him an appraising gaze.

“Let me guess, tacos?” he asked and she nodded. “Most important quality in a partner, Intelligence or sense of humor?”

“Why can’t I have both?” she asked and he shook his head at her. “Fine, sense of humor.”

“Intelligence.” He answered “Cups in the cupboard right side up or up side down?”

“Up side down. It’s more stable and causes fewer chips.” She answered. “Toilet paper on the dispenser facing up or down?”

“Down, what kind of psycho puts it on facing up?” he asked with a smile.

“My ex-husband. It drove me absolutely batty. That and leaving his socks right next to the laundry basket instead of in it.” She said getting more rapped up in the conversation than she had meant to.

“Well, as you can see I’m a pretty tidy guy so we should get along just fine.” His statement brought her back down to earth, remembering that she was once again going to be sharing a bed with this man. A man she hardly knew anything about. Noticing her sudden silence and her eyes that stared down at the floor he stood up from the chair and moved to sit next to her, a few inches of space between them. “What are you thinkin’ about, Dead Girl?” he asked as he bumped his shoulder against hers as if they had been friends for years.

“I…am… thinking about how I don’t think you’re going to be able to…fix, me. I know I’m fucked up. I watched you turn two men’s head into tomato soup and yet I still have no problem sharing a bed with you. A normal person, someone in their right mind, wouldn’t have willingly climbed into your truck, slept in your bed, or be sitting here with you like you couldn’t be the literal death of me.” She finally looked across her shoulder at his bright hazels looking at her as he listening closely. “If you can’t fix me will you at least make my death quick and painless?”

“I’m not going to kill you, darlin’. I refuse to except that you are un-repairable.” He replied.

She sighed and fell backwards onto the bed. “I hate this, you making me remember my past, trying to get into my head…”

“Well,” he started as he turned around and threw one of his legs over hers, straddling her, “there could be perks for both of us.”

She bit her lip as she placed her hands on his chest then slid them up to rest on each side of his neck, making him smirk cockily. “You can get into my head, or you can get into my pants. You can’t have both.” She patted him on the shoulder then slid down off of the bed, her nose brushing the crotch of his pants as she did. “Sorry Charlie.” She said as she stood up then turned to face him.

“Okay, then I’ll ask you some more questions.” He said as she moved around to sit in the middle of the bed.

“God, you’re borning.” She groaned then sat down in the dining chair to answer more pointless, boring questions.

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[theyearoftheking]

Book Thirteen: Christine

Here’s the list of things I accomplished instead of reading Christine:

Watched To All The Boys 2: PS I Still Love You (adorable)

Re watched To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before (still adorable)

Voluntarily worked out. Gross. 

Napped. A lot. Like mono, or narcoleptic levels of napping. Sooo much napping.

Perused all kinds of new adult/romance novels on Kindle Unlimited.

Downloaded several of them.

Felt guilty reading them instead of Christine.

Picked Christine back up.

Promptly took another nap. 

Wash, rinse, repeat. 

It’s crazy how I went from my new favorite Steve book, to my least favorite Steve book in about fifteen minutes. To put it mildly, Christine was the biggest pile of horseshit I’ve ever suffered through. And as someone who used to spend her summers at horse camp actually cleaning up horse shit, I know my shit. 

Christine is a corny, love-at-first-sight story between a boy and a junker car. Being married to a man who is happy driving a Kia Rio, this might as well be a foreign language novel. Arnie Cunningham sees Christine (a rotting 1958 Plymouth Fury) parked in Roland LeBay’s front yard and becomes obsessed in a single-minded way. He has to have her. Everyone around him, including his best friend Dennis tells him not to buy the car. But, of course Arnie buys the car. He becomes single-minded in his obsession with fixing up the car, and begins pushing people away from him, instead wanting to spend time with Christine. 

Shortly after Arnie purchases Christine, LeBay dies. Arnie and Dennis go to his funeral, and Dennis ends up having a long chat with Roland’s brother and finds out Roland’s daughter choked to death on a burger in the backseat of Christine; and his wife later committed suicide in the car. Oh, and Roland was a real asshole, and no one seems sad he’s dead. Bad juju, y’all. 

Arnie keeps working on Christine, and his personality starts changing. He keeps referring to people as “shitters” and he’s wearing a back brace... both things LeBay was guilty of doing. Dennis is low-key suspicious. But then Arnie gets a girlfriend; the beautiful and intelligent Leigh Cabot; and Dennis becomes low-key suspicious and jealous. Up until this point, Arnie was a nerd with horrible acne who girls didn’t pay attention to. But now his acne is clearing up, he’s looking older... and he’s snagged himself a girlfriend. Things are looking up for ‘ole Arnie.

Then shit gets crazy... anyone who insults Arnie or Christine; ends up meeting a violent end, courtesy of Christine, driven by the ghost of LeBay. And then Leigh chokes on a hamburger inside the car and almost dies, because LeBay has inhabited Arnie’s body, and he has no idea what the Heimlich maneuver is. Guys, I’m bored just typing up this review. This book was so repetitive... people wrong/insult/hurt Arnie and they end up as roadkill. Over, and over, and over again. Arnie continues slowly turning into an old man unable to pick up on a current cultural reference, and singly focused on his car. This just keeps going on and on and on until Dennis finally puts us (and Arnie) out of our misery when he uses a septic truck to crash Christine into tiny little pieces, and LeBay’s spirit tries to get back into Arnie’s body while he’s driving his mom’s station wagon, and he dies. The end. 

I’m just going to give Steve the benefit of the doubt, and assume he wrote this during his cocaine days. Because only someone high on drugs would think this is a quality book. Quite frankly, it’s a pile of (un)happy crappy. 

I even tried my hardest to look at the theme of obsession, and see if I could tie it back to our most modern obsession: our phones. Mine is sitting next to me as I type this, glaring at me very judgmentally. And on a certain level it works: social media and our phones impact our relationships the same way Christine impacted Artie’s relationship with Leigh. It can lead to feelings of neglect, jealousy, and abandonment. And maybe social media can even go insane, and run down thugs in the middle of the night. Okay, that was a stretch. Kind of like this whole book.

We did have one random Wisconsin reference, to Marquette University. The book is set in Pennsylvania, so I did a Google search, and there is no Marquette higher education institute in PA, so I’m claiming it as a WI reference. “Lenny stubbornly went about having the great year he needed to have if he was going to get the athletic scholarship to Marquette that he lusted after...” Go Lenny, I’m sure your parents are very proud of you. I keep pushing my daughter back into soccer in the hopes she’ll score an athletic scholarship. At this point I’d just better be saving up therapy money for the issues she’s going to have surrounding her Tiger Mother and soccer. 

One Dark Tower reference... two if you count the fact the villain is named Roland. I mean, this could be one of the other worlds other than his primary one. But I seriously hope not. Roland deserves better than a relationship with a murderous car. “We were like two reluctant gunslingers approaching each other.”  

God, I’m glad I’m done with this book. 

Total Wisconsin Mentions: 14

Total Dark Tower References: 9

Book Grade: D

Rebecca’s Definitive Ranking of Stephen King Books

Different Seasons: A+

The Shining: A-

The Stand: A-

The Dead Zone: B+

‘Salem’s Lot: B+

Carrie: B+

Creepshow: B+

Danse Macabre: B-

The Gunslinger

Firestarter: C+

Cujo: C-

Nightshift: C-

Christine: D

I wish I could say I’m pumped about my next book, but it’s Pet Sematary. Ugh. Double ugh. But I’m going to take a few deep breaths and remind myself The Talisman and an elementary martini are both waiting for me in just a few more reads. 

Oh and hey! Are you a fan of Steve like me? I highly recommend checking out ka-tet 19 for some sweet merch. I ordered a few pieces on Saturday, and was decked out in my Dark Tower awesomeness by Tuesday. Super fast shipping, and great quality products. My Gunslinger hoodie is really cozy. 

Until next time readers, Long Days & Pleasant Nights,

Rebecca

[imlostinsantacarla]

DATING GEORGE WEASLEY WOULD INCLUDE:

◾ Let’s get something super clear here, George is the more sensitive of the twins, which he never forgets thanks to his fabulous twin Fred who continuously brings it up.

◾ You’re either a companion within regards to their ideas for pranks or just in the prank itself, there is simply no in between. They’ve either slyly convinced you to fully commit to their life of cheeky crime or you’ve made it clear to them that you’re not willing to be completely responsible. And you know what? George and Fred love you for it.

◾ Unfortunately, you had to go through a ‘trial period’ at first with Fred, to ensure that you were good enough for his brother; which George, in the slightest bit, wasn’t too keen on, because he didn’t want you scared off and found it all a bit unnecessary.

◾ But you managed to pass, so it’s all just left in the past.

◾ Consistent teasing from Fred about how the both of you are so in love.

◾ “Oi, get a room not all of us can handle your love bird syndrome.”

◾ “Awe looks at the two love birds!”

◾ “You know Georgie, (Y/N)-”

◾ “Shut your mouth Fred, before I end you!”

◾ Always having thought that George was the more attractive of the twins.

◾ George having an immense soft spot for you, which Fred never misses the opportunity to point out lavishly.

◾ Protective asf George.

◾ Like, you won’t get to do anything that puts you even in the slightest of dangers.

◾ The shitter thing is that Fred will back him up 110%.

◾ But you somehow do it anyways, which means George ain’t too happy.

◾ Due to George being more emotional than Fred, I can definitely see him ranting to you about Umbridge or how Malfoy always puts his family down. You and Fred are usually the only ones able to calm him down so he won’t commit murder or any other unspeakable act.

◾ Sending notes in class, which leads the pair of you into detention, but George already had detention anyways.

◾ He’s excited about detention with you because he get’s to spend more time with you.

◾ When he get’s in detention you tend to get annoyed at him as you guys don’t always get to spend much time with each other alone, - especially if you’re in another house -.

◾ George won’t give a single damn about your blood status or what house you’re in, he cares about you for the person that you are and what brilliant qualities and quirks you have.

◾ With that noted, if you’re in another house, he’s gonna sneak you into the Gryffindor common room no matter how much you reprimand him.

◾ You sneak him into yours.

◾ Pranking each other lightly ( you not so much bc George hates making you upset). fucking softie.

◾ Fred and George learning the hard way not to prank you so much or too badly or at all really.

◾ Tender forehead kisses and long, warm cuddles that extend for hours on end.

◾ George is just a mega dork around you.

◾ Intertwined fingers and walks in the autumn leaves.

◾ Eyes lighting up with brilliant ideas.

◾ Silent communication, just a look in each others eyes will do.

◾ You’re stuck with Fred now too. Sorry it’s in their contract.

◾ The dork will definitely boop your nose if you’re sad or angry.

◾ He’s always making you smile, laugh and blush, which is just the way he likes it.

◾ Hates it when you’re in a bad mood or sad, he’ll do anything to get that grin back on your face.

◾ In private George will totally say more mushy stuff, he already get’s teased enough from Fred as it is.

◾ The pair of you never shut up about each other, everyone’s sick of it now.

◾ He twirls the end of your hair around his fingers, breathing about how soft and perfect it is.

◾ He’s romantic af.

◾ This boy will protect you and give you everything, okay?

◾ Deep meaningful hugs. BEAR HUGS!

◾ Dates that’re usually simple, but he always finds a way to make them sooo special so you won’t forget.

◾ Pretends to forget important dates with you so that he can get a little rise out of you before he kisses your nose or your mouth and tells you to shut up because he’s not that much of a brain dead git to forget your anniversary.

◾ Unlimited comfort.

◾ Being protective of him.

◾ Him throwing major hands when a guy flirts with you or when anyone hurts you.

◾ Inviting you to The Burrow every holiday.

◾ His family, - especially his parents -, loving you totally. You’ve suddenly been adopted by them without any consent, but you don’t mind tbh.

◾ Molly and Arthur constantly ask about you, they’ve sent you a Weasely sweater, but you still steal George’s.

◾ Helping Arthur understand muggle stuff and concepts better.

◾ George and Fred switching places, but it never fools you. Originally you got cross, but then began playing with them.

◾ Him and his family loving you for you and not focusing on your gender, race, sexuality, beliefs, etc. They’re always so accepting of you that it makes you sob.

◾ Sneaking into his room late at night when staying at The Burrow just for cuddles. Fred doesn’t mind as long as he can tease the shit out of you guys and also that there’s no funny business.

◾  Him giving you free stuff from his shop, but you insist on paying him back with kisses. 

◾ “I think I’m going to spew.”

◾ “Oh come on, Freddie! You love a bit of romance around.”

◾ “Yeah, but not when your tongues down (Y/N)’s throat, you git.”

◾ The banter is real mate.

◾ George being really intelligent, which surprises you but he helps you with your homework constantly.

◾ Helping him at the shop. more like distracting.

◾ Jump scaring tf out of you.

◾ Taking care of one another and treating each other with the utmost respect and love.

◾ You’ve definitely been caught by everyone at The Burrow when making out. The worst has to be Molly, she’ll give a long lecture that embarrasses the pair of you.

◾ When you cuddle with George in his room, Fred’s got to be clingy and join in.

◾ George buying you sweets.

◾ Breathy sweet nothings and husky morning voices.

◾ Honestly every day you wake up at The Burrow, George will always point out how adorable and sleepy you are.

◾ Fred and George teach you Quidditch, you’re not very good at it yet, which Fred teases you about, but George is always encouraging you.

◾ An immense about of fluff and happiness.

◾ Wiping away your tears and kissing it better.

◾ Being picked up and thrown over his shoulder bc it’s just George.

◾ Being Ginny’s role model, she loves you so much and everyone is so happy about it.

◾ George just gushes over you all of the time.

◾ Moving in with the twins in the small apartment above their joke shop.

◾ A cheeky, “Morning,” and wink from Fred every time you come out of your bedroom followed by George with messy hair and love bites.

◾ Aimless invisible patterns drawn on the skin which make you both shiver in delight.

◾ Deep loving kisses that can turn passionate and rough.

◾ Being obsessed with how he smells, and vice versa.

◾ Pulling on George’s cheeks and cooing to him like a little kid whenever he achieves something, it makes Fred and him laugh, though it irks him slightly.

◾ He’s literally your sunshine.

◾ You’re obsessed with the color of his hair, constantly playing with it whether his heads in your lap or you’re sitting on his lap.

◾ Major eye contact; if you were nervous about it originally, he got you comfortable with it.

◾ Interlocked fingers and soft eye contact during intimate moments.

◾ Tickle attacks.

◾ Peppered kisses.

◾ He’ll share his food with you, what a miracle!

◾ Always making sure that you’re taking care of each other.

◾ Taking care of each other when you’re both sick.

◾ Visiting each other when you’re sick at school.

◾ He loves it when you come to him about everything first, unless he get’s stumped on what to do. But him and Fred are your biggest cheerleaders, okay?

◾ He’s a sucker for neck kisses and biting or nails softly scratching down his back or arms.

◾ He loves it when you always come first.

◾ He’s super attentive with you.

◾ He can be sub or dom.

◾ Seriously, he’s brilliant at everything which makes your head spin.

◾ He speaks with his words a lot though his actions can be louder, because he’ll do things for/to you that he’d never do for/to anyone else.

◾ Genuinely dying of embarrassment whenever George and Fred find out something embarrassing about you.

◾ Not always quite during sex, but he can’t help it.

◾ He always loves a challenge, so if you’re at The Burrow and want that sort of intimate alone time, he’ll make is so hard for you to be quiet, which you’re so annoyed at him about later, but it wears off bc it was worth it.

◾ Literally shows you off to everyone. He’d never hide you or make you feel like he’s embarrassed to be with you.

◾ If you’re introverted, he’ll do his best to understand and do things that you enjoy, though it may take time for him to understand why you need so much alone time, but he’ll respect it. And if you’re extroverted, he’ll be happy too, loving to do everything with you. If you’re in the middle and an ambivert, a good mix will do!

◾ If anyone upsets you, that’s their target for cruel pranks for the rest of the year.

◾ GIF IS NOT MINE. GIF CREDIT GOES TO AMAZING OWNER! 💖

Please keep requesting imagines! If you like it, please follow for more.

[deltaengineering]

Summer Anime 2018 Part 1: Nurupo

I feel bad for calling last season weak now, since that turned out okay, what with Megalobox, Hinamatsuri and Rokuhoudou (the best show you didn’t watch). Maybe this is a lesson to not be so negative, but all the positivity in the world can’t make this season look good. To balance it out, I’ll be bringing along some hot opinions from people getting paid to see the bright side this time.

P.S. Part 2 is here.

Island

What: A very Frontwing version of When They Cry, apparently. Awesome McCooldude wakes up on an island full of pliant girls and/or dark secrets.

✅  looks alright

❌ story is tryhard mystery nonsense based on convenient amnesia, very unlikely to deliver

❌❌ an absolutely terrible cast of generic VN characters, enjoy your common route hijinks with them

❌❌ Frontwing being Frontwing, please see picture.

ANN sez: “This episode accomplishes the two things that it absolutely must for the series to have a chance of succeeding: it makes the main trio of girls endearing enough and layers on some intriguing mysteries.”

Hanebad!

What: Some girls take badminton very seriously. Somewhere between genocide and extinction level event seriously.

✅  well animated and directed

✅  there appears to be more to the characters than nothing at all, so the overbearing presence of the drama llama might actually pay off

❌ has a tendency to wallow in ostentatious KyoAni-style presentational kitsch

❌ speaking of which, making the cast of Euphonium look like a bunch of carefree slackers by comparison is not a good thing

ANN sez: “From the lush colors of their school's flowers to the alienating saturation and long shots of their gym hallways, every mood HANEBADO strives for is captured perfectly through its visual storytelling, and solidified through fundamentally sturdy dialogue and plotting.”

Senjuushi

What: Touken Ranbu with firearms.

❌ This is a cute boys doing cute things anime set against a backdrop of global thermonuclear war and combining the ultra seriousness of ufotable TR with the slice of life tone of Doga Kobo TR makes for a very, let’s say, “uneven” experience. 

❌  Unsurprisingly, it has the production values of neither of the above and looks like crap instead.

❌❌ The localized title is “The Thousand Musketeers” and given the reckless pace in which it introduces pointless characters, it might actually hit that number in 12 episodes.

❌❌ Mobile game character designs must be stopped, for fuck’s sake

ANN sez: “The story itself has some promise, especially if you're a fan of antique guns.“

Shichisei no Subaru

What: VRMMO light novel garbage about MMO newtypes.

❌ High tier light novel tropes like “u die in the game u die 4 real”, grade schooler magical girlfriends and demigod abilities

❌ Yes, the characters start as grade schoolers and then there’s a timeskip where they become high schoolers. They don’t change at all, which is either cutting commentary on arrested development or an indication of how good this show’s writing is.

❌ Ideas like permadeath in an MMO and giving good players a stake in the game company are hilariously stupid even by this genre’s standards.

❌ You’ve seen this exact cast of characters before, likely in better shows.

❌❌ There’s really no single egregiously bad aspect, but the stank of mediocrity is so overwhelming as to deserve a double minus all of its own.

ANN sez: “This episode banks heavily on the appeal of its mysteries, but those mysteries actually are pretty appealing, and I ultimately respect this episode's choice to introduce so much of its world and characters before getting to the real conceit.”

Banana Fish

What: A well regarded classic manga about New York’s seedy gang underbelly of drugs and violence. And BL.

✅ ✅   Looks good. Like actually, legitimately good. Animation, character design, directing, this show is quality.

❌ Updating the setting to contemporary times seems like a not so great idea since everything about this is deeply steeped in the mid-80s gang violence and drugs panic, no matter how many smartphones get used.

♎ The pacing is ultra fast. While I will admit that I’ll take that over a snoozefest (especially in a seasonal rundown), if this wants to be a legitimate high tier anime it needs to let the atmosphere breathe more. 24 episodes isn’t much for a 19-volume manga.

❌ I’ve praised MAPPA for promising first episodes before, and then I got the likes of Yuri on Ice and Virgin Soul out of it. This is not an anime original so it will be harder to fuck up, but life finds a way - especially given the need for condensing the story as noted above.

❌ Ultimately, just being a classy production with proven writing isn’t the be-all-end-all; quality aside, I still have to like what it does, and I’m not sure what amounts to a homoerotic 80s crime B-thriller is exactly in my wheelhouse.

✅ What else are you gonna watch this season?

ANN sez: “The one negative I can foresee is that one character is portrayed as a fairly stereotypical gay sexual predator, and this story pitches itself consistently as a seedier exploration of its boys' love subject matter, so it's reasonable to expect these kinds of details going forward.”

Yume Oukoku to Nemureru 100-nin no Ouji-sama

What: Girls get their wish-fulfilment isekai nonsense too, it’s just a pretty pointless definition when you can just say “basic otome harem” instead. But sure, nondescript girl wakes up in fantasy dream universe where she has a magical trait that makes a large number of princes desire her. Call it what you like.

♎ Successfully avoids the most obnoxious otome harem and isekai tropes, but that just makes it even more bland

❌ lots of exposition about an universe that is hardly complicated and transparently an excuse anyway

❌ Main character is agreeable but exceptionally boring

❌ The princes are all generically princely and very little else

❌❌ combine that with sluggish pacing and this might be the most boring show so far, which is not an easy feat

ANN sez: “There were also some neat details here and there that I particularly appreciated, like the fact that our heroine is actually a working adult, as well as the idea that rather than being “trapped in a new world” she's in truth been returned to her home.”

Back Street Girls

What: A trio of yakuza thugs get a forced sex change because their boss wants to be an idol producer. It’s funny, laugh.

❌ This is not the warm, fuzzy trans acceptance anime you’ve been looking for, to put it mildly. I am not easily offended, but it would have to be pretty darn good to outrun this premise. Yeah, about that...

❌❌ runs its one joke (idols are not supposed to be thugs, like, at all!) into the ground before it exceeds a 3-minute short runtime; is actually 24 minutes long anyway. Hope you really like that joke.

❌❌ the execution of said joke is the pits of anime comedy, nothing but reaction faces and shouting

❌❌ production values are basically non-existent, at most you can say that they took the time to color in those manga panels

❌ learning that Chiaki Kon is directing this pile is just sad, put THAT in your auteur pipe and smoke it.

ANN sez: Nothing, since western licensors mysteriously chose to skip this one. Really a shame because I was looking forward to the outrage.

Isekai Maou to Shoukan Shoujo no Dorei Majutsu

What: It has “Isekai” and “Maou” in the title so what do you fucking think. What it doesn’t tell you is that it’s also about an MMO, for the full LN shitter nuclear triad.

❌❌ It’s about a loser otaku who gets trapped in his MMO wherein he has the mostest hax, complete with complementary slave pettan catgirl and slave oppai elf

❌❌ This is meant to be funny because he’s too much of a dweeb to put his penis where his mouth is.

❌ Technically better executed than Death March or Isekai Smartphone, so it gets one single minus for effort.

ANN sez: “The idea that Takuma is so insecure about talking to other people that he can only comfortably speak in the voice of his demon lord character is ingenious in a dramatic sense and endearing in a personal one, while Takuma's clear understanding of his personal failings makes him far more sympathetic than the genre's usual snarky protagonists.”

Satsuriku no Tenshi

What: Early teen girl checks herself into Silent Hill General Hospital for grief counselling.

✅  Atmosphere works reasonably well; it’s creepy where it needs to be, which is everywhere and all the time.

❌ The girl is a nonfactor blob and the tough guy she gets paired up with is an annoying chuuni edgelord (it is called 𝔄𝔫𝔤𝔢𝔩𝔰 𝔬𝔣 𝔇𝔢𝔞𝔱𝔥 after all), which is not promising for the long run

❌ So obviously based on a run-of-the-mill spoopy RPGmaker freeware game you can practically see the floor tiles.

❌❌ 24 solid minutes of Getting Cornered By A Rape Metaphor quickly goes from unsettling to incredibly tedious.

❌❌ There’s really nowhere for this to go, given how unoriginal everything is; at best it’s going to be “it was all a dream”, at worst “everyone was dead all along, please feel sad now”.

ANN sez: “The design of the facility is one of those fanciful every-level-is-a-different-setting worlds, but the artistic effort strongly pushes the creepiness factor with a design aesthetic that suggests age, decay, and neglect.“

Harukana Receive

What: Girls play beach volleyball in scenic Okinawa, some light sports drama seems to be on the horizon.

✅  Looks just good enough

✅  Girls are just cute and likeable enough

❌ the sports aspect is weak; maybe I’m just spoiled on Emiya-san’s incredible beach volleyball scene right now, but even when not compared to a top tier studio ostentatiously flaunting the budget of their fucking cooking short the match here isn’t very compelling.

♎ where Hanebad has a bad case of the cereals, this may have the opposite problem of being too cotton candy to be worth it

✅  “good enough” is not a ringing endorsement, but counts for something when being just okay will net you a third or possibly second place of the season.

ANN sez: “This is, of course, all just conjecture right now. ”

Chio-chan no Tsuugakuro

What: We took Nichijou and replaced the surrealism with video game references and the production values with donkey dung. Let’s see if delta notices!

❌❌ Production values are not optional when you want to be Nichijou; it being astoundingly over the top and imbued with impeccable timing is a (or even the) main part of Nichijou’s appeal. Without them you’re left with basic reactionface manzai over awkward situations, the king of comedy.

❌❌ Suffice it to say, this show is 100% trying to be funny, while also 100% not succeeding at being funny.

❌Asscreed is a more original tentpole to rotate your first episode around than the usual Dragon Quest, but not by much.

♎ neurotic nerd main character that is little more than a bundle of social anxieties will be #relatable to anime professionals, observe:

ANN sez: “Chio's overthinking in this situation is both hilarious and painfully true-to-life, with her furious strategizing coming across as both absurd and very familiar to anyone who's not comfortable in conversation.”

Planet With

Wat: Appears to be a tokusatsu/crypto-mecha show aimed at the younger set, with the gimmick being that our protagonist is (initially?) on the side of the villains(?).

✅  Pretty wacky, actually. It definitely doesn’t neatly fit in your square notions of what an anime is, man (unless you’ve watched FLCL).

❌ It seems very uncertain whether the wackiness is in service of anything. It might be To Be Heroine, or it might just be Heybot with fewer fart jokes.

♎ Furthermore, it wants to be intriguing and sort of is, but merely being intriguing is not that hard - you just make no sense and hope for the best. This has the not making sense part down, do you feel lucky?

❌ tries to build up characters by immediately going for the sad flashbacks, which I never like, especially if the rest of the show is eIDLIVE-level nonsense.

❌ Looks mostly fiiiiiine, but is also full of subpar CG

ANN sez: “So if the heroes are fighting against someone who just wants peace, then what does that make them? And more importantly, if they find out that the bears aren't evil, will they stop?”

Hataraku Saibou

What: A cutesy educational comedy about the workings of a human body.

✅  Well made, characters are cute, topic is interesting.

❌ Educational aspect can get in the way; I’m not suddenly giving heavy exposition a pass just because it’s trying to teach me something, especially if it’s things I basically already know.

♎ Will have to show if it can keep coming up with good scenarios. The lung infection in episode 1 was alright and so will probably be the skin cut in the preview, but beyond that I’m not sure what’s left for red and white blood cells to do. I’m not expecting a show with this tone to tackle things like retroviruses, if you know what I mean.

♎ An actual storyline seems like too much to expect, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing but not a positive either.

✅  Doesn’t rock my socks off but is an easily watchable show with a fine idea and high production values, which again is hard to say no to right now.

ANN sez: “But since it culminates in one of my favorite scenes from the manga, visualizing sneezing as shooting a torpedo out your nose, I can forgive the random gendering of cells.”

Ongaku Shoujo

What: DEEN are getting in on the idol mobile game anime biz too.

✅  The main character’s gimmick is that apart from being A Honk, she can’t sing for shit; this is moderately funny.

❌ It might have counted for more if that hadn’t come out seconds before the episode ended. Even if it isn’t a momentous twist, it was more of a point of interest than the incredibly bland leadup to it had.

❌  Yeah, “Ongaku Shoujo” is an entirely indicative name of how generic this show is: Music + girls, indeed. I assume “Idols” was taken.

❌ I’m still not sure what the ideal cast size of a show like this is, but 12 idols is Idolmaster turf and as such too many. They have personalities? I think?

❌ a very small handful of cuts aside, woeful production quality; I know picking on DEEN is 2ez but this is not their finest work. Animation snobs can feel proud that there’s no CG dancing here, for the rest of us it’s an object lesson on why CG is the lesser of two evils.

✅  Tumbling SR cards in the ED (which is probably actually the OP) made me laugh; this show can’t even afford URs.

❌❌ Overall, just another idol show. Large cast plus presence of a P-san marks it as Im@s-type – but if you're in the market for an Idolmaster clone with bad looks, I would recommend Wake Up Girls instead because that’s at least pretty real at points.

ANN sez: They’re out for the weekend, ask again later. I suspect it’s nothing funny.

[nooneaskedme-but]

2017’s Finest - The Best Songs of 2017

Now, you can call 2017 a lot of things, but there’s one thing you can’t call it: a good year for music!

Though this year was a general shit storm, never mind musically, there were a few gems to come out and shine this year. From pop punk saviors to alt pop goddesses, there were a select handful of songs that managed to salvage 2017. Here we go!

1. Lit Me Up - Brand New (Science Fiction)

The opening track on Brand New’s latest (and final) studio effort, Science Fiction, Lit Me Up is as deep as it is eerie. It was because of this song that I not only listened through the rest of the album, but also revisited everything I had previously missed in Brand New’s discography. Listening to it brings you this numbing, sinking feeling. Yet, you just can’t turn it off. No matter what you’re into, I highly recommend listening to this song at least once.

2. Lust for Life - Lana Del Rey ft. The Weeknd (Lust for Life)

I’ve ranted and raved about how amazing this song is all year, so I’ll keep it brief with my incessant praise. I’ll just say that, this track is everything that Lana’s massive following have come to love about her, and more. Her and The Weeknd coexist beautifully here and create some amazing harmonies, really sealing in the quality of this song. Eight months and a zillion plays later, and this track still remains one of my favorite songs of all time.

3. The Louvre - Lorde (Melodrama)

Up until the release of this album, I hadn’t been much into Lorde. Royals was as far as it he went for me. But, this song, this album, it really opened my eyes to how beautiful her music is. If I had to define romance, I’d just play this song as loud as I possibly could. It’s so cute, yet so brilliant. I get both butterflies and chills whenever I hear it play.

4. Double Helix - Knuckle Puck (Shapeshifter)

Now, no one in the scene has the balls to admit this, but I will. Pop punk, as a whole, has kinda been in the shitter for a few years now. For the most part, it’s become trite, overly generic, lack luster, you name it. That being said, I can really vibe with this song. It has enough edge and passion to break the mold while still staying true to the name and the morals of the scene. It’s with this song that Knuckle Puck, among a few select others, continue to Defend Pop Punk™️.

5. Heavy - Linkin Park ft. Kiiara (One More Light)

I’ve said this countless times before Chester passed away (May he Rest In Peace), but this album received much more heat than it deserved. Do people really expect a band to stay the same forever, to maintain the same sound from their first album on their tenth? No, that’s ridiculous. Before I stray too far, though, this song is so beautifully done. The lyrics has a lot of depth, even more so now that Chester’s gone, and it has a smooth and pleasant sound. To anyone reading this, I beg of you. If you haven’t already, please open your ears and give this tune a listen. I promise you, it’s worth it.

So, these were the songs that I felt saved music as a whole, this year. That being said, there were quite a few others that weren’t groundbreaking, but held quite a bit of merits in their own. Here we go with some honorable mentions!

Honorable Mentions

- This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things - Taylor Swift (Reputation)

This song was just too petty to not put on this list. It’s the perfect balance between petty, savage, and synth pop craftsmanship.

- Wildfire - blink-182 (California Deluxe Edition)

California would’ve had a place in the best songs category had I not been so let down by its release. That being said, Wildfire really stuck with me. Though recycled, the riffs are timeless, and Matt Skiba works absolute wonders with this track.

- Everybody Dies In Their Nightmares - xxxtentacion (17)

I feel like this track in particular goes hand in hand with the theme of sad a e s t h e t i c that seems to have taken over 2017. XXX delves deeper into darker, more serious territory with suicidal thoughts and tendencies, also touching on the very relatable nighttime depression. It’s a very real song, and I heavily vibe with it.

- Get Free - Lana Del Rey (Lust for Life)

At first, I was going to reserve this spot for the song ‘Cherry’, also on featured Lust for Life. While they’re both impeccable tracks, I can’t help but feel saddened that only a handful of people know this song exists. I’d honestly dare to say it’s one of the most beautiful, liberating songs ever produced. It’s literally flawless from start to finish, and I challenge anyone to ever tell me otherwise.

And there you have it, my top picks of the year! I know a lot of people will disagree, and that’s completely okay. This shit is subjective, after all.

What were your favorites of the year? Tell me in a reply! As always, it’s been a pleasure. Happy Holidays, everybody❤️✨

Stay Tuned for More!

-

[charlieharry1]

The Ultimate Guide for Killer Blog Content

Everybody realizes that keeping an enhanced, continually refreshed blog with is one of the most dependable approaches to fire developing a webpage and drive natural traffic in. The inquiry is: if something so  Digital Marketing Agencies in Newcastle basic can have such a positive effect on your advancement technique, for what reason isn't everyone exploiting it?

 All things considered, for one, a great deal of upgraded sites as of now do. Particularly the individuals who have some expert SEO firm support them up.

 In any case, among the individuals who aren't, you can normally sift through them into two gatherings: Those who think they are however are really coming up short in a few basic regions. Also, the individuals who simply go "I'm not an essayist" or "I don't have a clue how" and simply leave the blog area gathering dust.

 This present guide's here to get you out of the primary gathering, on the off chance that you are there, or remove the reason on the off chance that you are in the subsequent one.

 You don't should be Stephen King to keep up a SEO improved blog that carries traffic to your webpage, however you do require an arrangement. A recipe. Something that shields you from going around like a headless chicken sitting around idly, exertion, and winding up disappointed when things don't work out.

 Your Blogpost's Blueprint

 Designers don't wake up one day and go "Welp, I get it's an ideal opportunity to go set up that building." We'd all be covered in rubble as of now if there wasn't any sort of arranging included. No, every structure, from a little cottage to a high rise starts with a plan. Something that enables plan, to foresee, execute, and forestall squandering assets.

 Quality substance for your blog is the same.

 Truly, you could lounge around taking a gander at a clear screen holding back to be thumped in the head with the motivation pixie's crowbar. Or then again you can accomplish the work and get the outcomes. We'll give you a second to conclude which is better.

 When you have an arrangement – when you comprehend what to do – making quality substance for your blog turns into another improvement errand to deal with. An undertaking that, similarly as with everything else throughout everyday life, may appear to be hard from the start yet will get simpler as you keep at it reliably.

 Goodness, and being steady? That is Key.

 Something else, your blogging technique will barely yield any outcomes. We should call that "exercise zero."

 This implies, on the off chance that you begin feeling sooner or later like this may be an over the top task, you should adhere to it regardless. It may take you an hour or more to experience the entire outline the first occasion when you go at it. In any case, do it enough, and you'll be siphoning incredible, enhanced blog pieces in the blink of an eye – Especially in the event that you follow the additional tips toward the end.

 Stage 1 – Choose Your Topic

 Thoughts are modest, and that makes the outline's first stage extremely straightforward: All you have to do here is to concocted a subject to expound on. It doesn't get any more direct than that.

 Experiencing difficulties as of now? Try not to worry, many individuals do until they comprehend they don't need to rehash an already solved problem.

 Consider your business/specialty/item for a second. At that point, consider related themes your intended interest group may be keen on. Record a couple.

 As yet nothing? That is alright as well. In the event that you are lacking in thoughts, you simply need to "take" like a craftsman.

 Do two or three laps around your rivals' destinations, specialty sites, gatherings, pertinent subreddits… Even a twitter #hashtag search. See what individuals in those spots are keen on or discussing. Discover a few those you know about, or would have the option to discuss, or chip in with an alternate point of view and record them.

 Congratulations, Stage 1 of the diagram is finished. When you have in any event one strong point you can expound on – regardless of whether you don't know precisely what you'll state yet – you are well on your way.

 Stage 2 – Do a Quick Keyword Research

 Notwithstanding, a theme is only the beginning.

 Regardless of whether you definitely recognized what you needed to state about your theme, we aren't here to make "simply" content. "Simply" content is a great method to sit around. We are here to make streamlined substance, and that is an entire 'nother story.

 For that, you need great catchphrases.

 In the event that you don't have a clue what catchphrases are, a snappy inquiry on our insight database ought to raise you to an acceptable level. This guide isn't for that. This guide is tied in with offering you commonsense guidance on the best way to siphon out great substance.

 The people at Ahrefs have an extraordinary video on the best way to do catchphrase research, regardless of whether you don't have a paid device like theirs. Here are the CliffsNotes:

 Introduce the Keywords Everywhere Chrome augmentation, which lets you see search volumes in most web indexes.

 Go to Keyword Shitter and create a rundown (10 – 15 ought to do) of catchphrases identified with your theme. Do a brisk Google scan for your subject and take a couple of high-volume related catchphrases from Keywords Everywhere's rundown.

 Type in your subject in Google Correlate and get a feeling of related sub-points. These subtopics can be use as watchwords now and then, just as different uses (more on this later.)

 Presently, each time you have a point, go to Keyword Shitter and Google, create a rundown of catchphrases. Take the one that all the more intently identifies with your subject – and has the bigger volume of searches – and use it as your fundamental catchphrase. Select a couple more with the accompanying greatest volumes and perhaps use them as auxiliary watchwords.

 Are there better approaches to get watchwords? Absolutely. Is like this adequate to get your blog content technique going? Completely.

 When you have a subject and a bunch of good catchphrases, proceed onward to Stage 3.

 Stage 3 – Titles and Outlines

 Outfitted with your theme and catchphrases, it's an ideal opportunity to fire getting down to business that new blog piece. First thing to take care of? Create an extraordinary title for your post.

 A couple of things to remember:

 Your titles need to contain your principle catchphrase.

 They ought to be held under 70 characters, plus or minus.

 They ought to plainly demonstrate the substance of your piece and its worth.

 Conceptualize a couple of titles for your piece based around the catchphrases you explored. Spend in any event a couple of moments doing this. Finding a title will assist you with fleshing out the thoughts you'll need to discuss, and the point you'll need to take.

 Intend to make somewhere in the range of 5 and 10 title varieties before choosing one, and ensure the one you stay with scores at any rate a 60 in CoSchedule's feature analyzer. This will help ensure you have an advanced, adjusted title.

 Having conceptualized a piece for your title, that blog entry thought ought to be more clear in your mind. However, it's an ideal opportunity to give it structure.

 On the off chance that you are proficient about the theme and have written down the focuses you need to cover, make a rundown you can use as captions for each segment (additional focuses on the off chance that you incorporate watchwords here, however don't constrain it.) Add an introduction, an end, and you'll have a layout that should resemble this:

 Introduction

 Point 1

 Point 2

 Point X

 End

 On the off chance that you have a title yet are as yet uncertain how to structure your blog entry, you can pick among the most famous blog types for the one that coordinates your theme best:

 News Post: Take a bit of news straightforwardly identified with your theme and compose your perspective on the issue.

 Read Also:-  Top 10 Ways to Grow Your Email List

Instructional post:Write a post portraying or clarifying a procedure your crowd would discover valuable or fascinating. How-tos and guides fall in this class.

 Records Post: Putting together a rundown that offers some benefit to a peruser is consistently a smart thought. Despite your theme, you'll in all likelihood have the option to make a rundown identified with it. Expound a piece on every thing on your rundown, and you'll have your post.

 Audits: Simple, give your interpretation of an item or administration firmly identified with your profession. Educated suppositions and points of view are constantly refreshing on the web.

 Choose a sort of post, and compose a diagram about the focuses you need to address. On the off chance that it's a news blog, you can begin with an introduction covering the news, imparting your insights and viewpoints as individual focuses, and wrap up with an end. In the event that you go for a rundown, make sense of what it is you are posting, and make every passage a state of your layout.

 Making a spotless, definite framework is the lynchpin of your blog's plan!

 It's your blueprint that will shield you from babbling one point and disregard others. It's your blueprint that will keep  Digital Marketing Companies Newcastle you from halting part of the way through, uncertain of what to compose straightaway. It's your diagram that will assist you with fleshing out your substance, even before you compose the main word.

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[tessatechaitea]

Justice Society of America #1 (1992)

Hourman looks like he's trying to remember how long they've been battling this thing.

If your super power is that you take a pill that lets you have super powers for one hour, don't call yourself Hourman. Why would you tell every villain you're battling that if they just prolong the fight for a little over sixty minutes, they'll kick your ass? My theory is that Hourman's pills actually work for two hours and by purporting that his powers only last an hour, he eventually takes them by surprise when they find he didn't lose his powers. Also, by making them think he'll be powerless at the end of an hour, any stalling tactics they choose to use just gives more time for JSA backup to arrive. Maybe Hourman is smarter than I thought! I remember picking up this comic book because something in me wanted to like and appreciate the Justice Society. I believe I eventually killed that part of me with hallucinogenic mushrooms and alcohol. I also think I gave it a try because of the cartoony cover art and the logo that screams, "This is a cartoon!" It totally fooled me even though, at twenty, I should have realized comic books and cartoons were quite different mediums.

We interrupt this comic book review to say good morning to Gravy. Note the Lobo statue and the H.P. Lovecraft horror corner angle of my office.

The issue begins by reminding the readers that the Justice Society is composed of old geezers. But they don't look super old even though they fought Nazis because they were trapped in a bottle fighting Ragnarok or something. That's how I remember it and I won't be convinced of anything different. Erasing incorrect memories and replacing them with facts is probably like using an old VHS tape to constantly tape over old shows. Pretty soon the quality of the tape is fucked and you can't tell what the hell you're watching. And I don't want my brain to become an old VHS tape full of static and flip-flopping images! I'd rather it be full of crystal clear misinformation!

Popcorn for the kid and a large cup of bull semen for gramps!

These two nobodies have come to Gotham Stadium to see an exhibition put on by the Justice Society. They're all there: the ones with wings, the one with the bedpan on his head, the squat one that definitely gets paid to shit in people's mouths, the blind one, the one with a wood allergy, the one with the pill addiction, the gassy one, the possessed one, the furry, and Starman. You can tell they're an older generation group because only one of them is female and she's just a redundant copy of Hawkman. Clark and Lois are in attendance to sort of explain why the Justice Society aren't super old farts.

I guess I'll learn the details when I get around to reading Armageddon 2001 and its spin-offs. That was the crossover where Captain Atom becomes tyrant of the world in a dystopian future. Oh, sorry. It was actually Hawk and not Captain Atom because all the readers immediately guessed it was Captain Atom and the editors were all, "We need to surprise the audience! Make it a character nobody would have guessed or even cared about at all!"

Lois starts getting romantic and maudlin thinking about how she and Clark may get to spend as many years together as the Justice Society and she turns to him and says half of something romantic before she's interrupted by Clark saying, "Hey, there's the mayor!" What a scoop! Although why the fuck is Clark getting so excited about the mayor of Gotham? The mayor calls the Justice Society "America's greatest heroes" and Clark's boner doesn't subside because he's such a humble Kansas farm boy. Can't we agree that just because somebody was first doesn't mean we have to hold them up as being the best? I mean, George Washington was the first president of the United States but nobody considers him the greatest president. That was obviously Jimmy Carter. That wasn't a joke. Jimmy Carter was our greatest president. Change my mind. No wait. Don't change my mind. There's nothing I hate more than debating over the Internet. Just go have an ice cream cone and calm the fuck down. The mayor introduces all of the Justice Society for the young kids reading who are just thinking, "Who the fuck are these jerks?" The giant monster that crawls up from underground conveniently waits to attack until the entire team is introduced. Good thing or else I'd keep thinking, "Why is Jimmy Olsen on the Justice Society?" Now I know that's Johnny Thunder! Those of you paying close attention already know I knew that was Johnny Thunder when I referred to him as "the possessed one."

Don't you mean "What in Earth?", Hawkwoman?

Ha ha! I'm like the one asshole you time travel with who always responds to the person saying "Where are we?" with "Don't you mean 'When are we?'" Always such a good line that's been said five million times so it always seems weird when some script writer thinks it's okay to use it yet again. Fuck I hope nobody says it in the new Bill and Ted movie. Justin (the young man with the grandfather guzzling bull semen) gets so excited he leaps head first out of the upper deck. Hawkwoman saves him because the guys are too busy not being compassionate enough. Although did he want to be saved? I don't know. I might take the dive if I had to hang out with a guy who drinks large cups of bull semen. Medium or small, I could handle. I might even indulge in a small. But fucking large? And overflowing! So gross.

Oh the nights I've had that began with me thinking, "If I can only get a wirepoon through that Moby Dick!"

Superman swoops in to beat up the monster and steal all of the attention for himself. I guess he did bristle at the notion that the Justice Society were America's greatest heroes. He could have at least waited a few minutes to see if they could stop the monster without all dying of heart attacks. I suppose as soon as Sandman crumpled to his knees while clasping his chest and screaming, "I'm comin'!", Superman felt forced to intervene.

The pill popper is just saying what we're all thinking.

Superman mentions that this is the Justice Society's retirement party. That makes sense. I shouldn't have assumed that they were returning to reality to constantly battle the Ultra-Humanite. They just want their pension checks and some hard candies. Sandman is down and Johnny Thunder believes he's had another stroke.

Luckily Wildcat got to Sandman before the mouth shitter.

Later, Alan and Jay* go to a diner to indulge in some exposition (*Alan is Green Lantern and Jay is The Flash -- Nerd Editor Big Nerd Grunion!). They returned to Earth rejuvenated but now some of that is wearing off. I guess maybe in Armageddon Inferno, they returned much younger and now for this series, the writer wanted to get them back up to kind of old. But not super old like all of their wives and husbands! Not that any of them have husbands because they're all straight males (I think! This is before Alan became New 52 gay). They discuss how back in their day, they only had to fight "jewel thieves and bank robbers" while the new heroes now battle "mass murderers" too. Did they forget about all the Nazis they fought?! Maybe they just remember them as simple art thieves?

Oh, okay. They remember Hitler and the Nazis. It's just a seeming smallish footnote in their story, I guess.

While having coffee, Jay and Alan get their super hero news alerts just like they always have: a television playing in the background with the sound way up. Apparently some "anti-nuke loonies" have laid siege to a nuclear reactor. And they're not as peaceful as you'd expect people who are anti-nuclear power would be; they're armed and, um, loony?

Oh, I guess they are loonies! They're just not anti-nuke like Alan assumed. He is old so everybody fucking up the status quo is probably just another Goddamned hippie to him.

Who is that guy and who are the mutant wild life and why have they been imprisoned? It would have been easier to understand if they actually were armed hippies protesting against nuclear war by exploding a power plant. Oh, duh. That's Cain, leader of The New Order! How could I forget Cain and the New Order after only 28 years! The other members of New Order are Scud, Ammo, Corona, and...Pooch? They're not too experienced or maybe Alan and Jay are super experienced because Alan and Jay beat them like a schoolyard bully beats the new kid's younger sister while making the new kid watch. That was my last simile from my stash of bulk similes I had Pickle Boy write me a few months ago. I guess it was good enough. But now I'm going to need more! Green Lantern and The Flash decide they're not ready to retire after playing hero. But they don't decide it with dignity and gravitas. The Flash just says, "Retirement?" And Green Lantern embarrassingly responds, "Not!" Ah ha ha! Oh, 1993, how I miss you! I mean I don't but I'm not going to say the word that implies I didn't really mean that which makes the entire statement super funny because I'm referencing a film based on a short sketch that was totally hilarious. Justice Society of America #1 Rating: C. It's probable that this series was green-lit simply because DC management were nostalgic for the Justice Society. I'm sure the pitch was simply, "Picture this: the Justice Society of America! But older! But not too much older! Just the right amount of older!" And everybody was all, "Okay. Sure. Whatever. We're busy planning the death of Superman over here. Just do what you want." I guess that was good enough. I mean, I bought it and I was not very discriminating at all! You picked up a lot of comic books you didn't really care about when they were only a buck twenty-five per issue.

[tobystevensonycarudy]

Evaluation

Final Piece again -

Successful?

I think that the final piece turned out most successfully as I think it appears interesting, fluent and colourful throughout the whole animation. I also think it does an ok job with taking the viewer around some of Nottingham’s most iconic places.

The colours added to the video help make it appear different and more professional as well as helping certain details standout such as the lights reflected in the water and the light in general at the train station.

The final video could also be improved for example having a smoke trail behind the lights as this would make it more believable and realistic. The timing of some of the lights could also have had some more time spent on them so they appear more consistent unlike the red light at the train station.

Finally, the other thing that could have been improved is the actual quality of the video since at the moment in the final piece some detail is lost such as the clock face in the final scene.

What went well?

Changing the colour of the background using effects went well as this was probably the easiest part of the process and allowed me to manipulate the atmosphere to fit the music however I wanted.

I also thought using the masks wasn’t that hard to do and allowed me to experiment with depth and position, however, looking back at the animation now and pausing in certain areas I could have done a much better job at masking and being more accurate but since the animation is so fast during the parts where masking is used its not that noticeable.

Creating the Union Jack explosion also went well since I thought that it was easy to carry out after creating the initial explosion. I also think that it’s the subtleness of the Union Jack which makes it more effective by it not overpowering the word saying “Nottingham”. The flag itself was also helpful as it provided a sort of line for the text to go on and helped me in choosing what size to have the final text.

The final font of the text itself I think was chosen correctly since, in my opinion, it looks elegant and sophisticated to help fit the culturalist Nottingham society. The two final fonts that I was going to choose from were between “Shitter” and “Prisma”.

Shutter -

Prisma -

I almost chose the “Prisma” font but after giving it the same glitch effect I don't think it looked as good nor did it look like it fit the rest of the video behind it. It also changed the whole atmosphere to appear too eerie which is not what I was going for.

Finally, for things that I think went well I would say that the added larger lens flares that came over the screen during a beat when nothing else was happening.

I really liked this addition to the piece and think even more added detail like this would have made it look far more impactful and intriguing. The flare also helped emphasise the light glow and made it appear larger and more scintillating.

Without large flare -

With large flare -

What didn’t go so well?

Shooting the actual footage could have been better by maybe finding different areas in the same place with just more light so more detail could be visible. A camera that could have easier dealt with night footage could have also worked better but I think the noise was still reduced effectively anyway.

The light reflections in the water could have also been made to look more believable with perhaps an added ripple effect or changing the opacity, however, doing this may have slowed After Effects down even more which is one of the things I was trying to avoid.

One thing that particularly didn’t go so well which wasted a lot of time and made the final piece look worse was that when I duplicated the original pre-composed light layer and tried to add curves or other effects to that layer it wouldn’t apply to the whole of the light which I couldn’t find the reason for.

So in an attempt to try and fix this, I had to create a new shape layer and try to recreate the colour I wanted the light to be with a shape and have it cover the area that didn’t change colour along with it following the actual light.

For the final thing that I think could have gone better I would say the audio used in the video possibly being different, although it’s orchestral with a good beat to sync to along with a fast pace which is one of the ideas I had in the development stage, I think more of an intense sounding audio with a more silent finish would have worked better to let the word “Nottingham” have a bigger impact. I think I could have found music to suit this better idea in my mind but it would have probably been not royalty free.

If the music didn’t have to be royalty free I would have probably chosen audio more like this as I think it has more bounce and character to it.

If using this audio I would have made the animation longer by having a pause between where the lights meet and when the explosion occurs, the pause would be during the silence of the audio at 3:00 and the explosion would happen at 3:04 in the audio.

What have I learned?

During this project, I have learnt first of all to be more confident with a camera and how to record more effectively by trying different heights with the tripod and panning at different angles to best fit my idea.

During the digital process, I became a lot more confident with Premiere-Pro by using the adjustment settings to reduce noise and knowing how to save and export in a 4k format for YouTube.

For After Effects I experimented with the particle systems effect which allowed me to create appearances that I wouldn’t have known how to do before, the wave warp made me realise how much personality I could add to objects by changing the intensity. Also, I learnt how to make objects 3D which enables me to change the angles and positions more specifically to create a more realistic appearance.

The camera shaking and video stretching was another aspect I learned using After Effects which helped me change the mood and pace of the scene which was also useful.

Finally and in my opinion, the most useful thing I have learnt as mentioned already is figuring out how to mask in After Effects. I think that this would be really useful for future projects I might want to take on and therefore the most important thing I have learned during this project.

What would I do differently next time?

Next time I would probably plan more in terms of when getting a camera to record and knowing when to shoot the footage instead of recording it all on the same day in a rushed manner.

I would also just add more animation with lights and shapes to make the piece look more interesting, along with this I would choose audio that would have more character by it being able to react with the visuals more rather than it just being used to change location or have a flare come on screen.

[someonetotaketheedgeoff-blog]

06.06.2017 – Melbourne Comedy & Hobart Comedy

So far Melbourne stand-up is brutal. There’s a massive number of open mics. One nearly every night - the reason I moved here. Nothing in Hobart could’ve prepared me for the savagery and insanity of Melbourne.

Hobart’s awesome. There’s a great community of comedians and sick rooms. There’s way less comedians so rooms have more time to be prepared and thus, have a standard of quality.

Interestingly there’s no comedy open mics in Tasmania (at least since I’ve done comedy). There’s general open mics of course. But doing comedy at a non-comedy open mic is like performing a lap dance at a funeral - it can go either way.

All the shows in Tassie are set up in advance. They’re like organised open mics. Roughly 6 – 10 acts, 5 minutes each with an interval. Maybe the last acts get 10 minutes.

Melbourne… is a bit different.

Open mic rooms run every week and are free entry. They’re usually in weird places. Dive bars and small alternative bars. They get minimal advertising and usually 75% of the audience are comedians.

It can be the best night ever or completely fucked.

Sometimes it’s a chill, low-key vibe and everyone’s on the same page. Sometimes the audience don’t even know comedy is about to happen and are eating their dinner and now are involved in crowd work they didn’t want to be a part of – which can create a sour energy in the room. I’ve always held the opinion that you can’t force comedy onto people.

Open mics ironically can be some of the least funny places. When there’s 9 people left in a room and 8 of them are comedians and it’s 10:45pm in some dive bar on a Tuesday and 4 people bomb in a row harder than you’ve seen anyone bomb and the energy in the room has palpable hate, pain and aggression, it can seem like the opposite of comedy.

Sometimes you’re glad to have dark, fucked up energy in the room just so there’s energy in the room at all.

Not saying this is bad. This is good. This is what it takes to be a good comedian. I just had no idea because Hobart is very friendly, supportive and gentle (in comparison). A bigger city doesn’t mean better. It’s bigger so there’s more room for better but also more room for shitter.

It only feels savage and fucked up because I’m from Hobart. Melbourne comedians aren’t phased. It’s a harsh realisation. I’ve been doing comedy for about a year and a half. That might as well translate to six months due to the lack of gigs and variety in Hobart. As well as my lazy work ethic. Melbourne comedians can gig every night. The ones that give a fuck will be better, seasoned and un-phased by the shit I’m whinging about.

Guerrilla Comedy

Last Wednesday I did a gig called Guerrilla Comedy. It’s my favourite gig in Melbourne so far. It’s completely fucked – sometimes good, sometimes bad. It’s in this shisha bar/restaurant in a basement with only bean bags and couches to sit on.

It’s kinda Rasta themed. Reggae plays and strange psychedelic art hangs on the walls and random acoustic guitars lean against walls.

In the corner, there’s an unassuming Marshall guitar amp and a mic on stand.

Not only does the microphone not work very well you must hold the cord in a certain way otherwise it makes fucked up electrical sounds.

Regardless the 4 times I’ve ever been it’s never failed to be a fucking hilarious and/or insane evening.

There’s this giant Kenyan guy called Josel that is like the resident heckler. He’ll usually walk down the steps during the second bracket in the middle of someone’s set, listen for 3 seconds and call out – ‘Aye man comedy’s meant to be funny man… stop trying to be emotional… be funny man… like Kevin Heart!.’

One night Josel interrupted everyone’s set. He wasn’t vicious or mean he just couldn’t seem to help himself. It was annoying but it eventually turned hilarious somehow and now he’s sort of like a weird regular character in the room.

First time I went I saw this female comedian and Josel heckled her. She walked up to him, got an inch away from his face and said in an intense whisper that crackled through the fucked mic - ‘If you don’t stop talking I’m going to fist you and wear you like a glove’. Un-phased Josel replied – ‘Aye man… comedies meant to be funny man’.

The show usually starts with some crowd work involving some reluctant people trying to eat a burger and smoke a shisha in peace that didn’t know comedy was about to begin.

Then there are 2 brackets. Then there’s the open mic.

I did the second bracket and did half OK and bombed the other half. It was confusing because the material had worked before. I listened back to the recording in pain and it was hard to tell what went wrong. This is when comedy becomes like self-harm. Comedy can be your friend but it can also be your dominatrix – both have good qualities.

The show was good. Energy was up and down. Towards the end a friend of Josel’s was sitting at the front on a bean bag and was laughing hysterically. The energy in the room was so low that it was a weird juxtaposition. Made me wonder if he understood the jokes fully. Eventually a comic commented on this guy’s enthusiasm and the guy was like, ‘Aye man I love this shit!’. It came to the last act of the night and it was him! He got up from the bean bag, strutted around for a bit and garbled some nonsense into the mic. It seemed like it wasn’t going to be so good, but then he started to gather some momentum and laughs.

He then went around the room. He asked everyone to quickly ask him a question. The first person was my friend Jen that I’d brought along to the gig.

‘What is your question for me?’ he asked.

‘Where’s this going?’ answered Jen.

He went around the room. People asked questions and he had quite good quips back. I went upstairs to get a beer, saw the guy that runs the room and said thanks for having me on. As we chatted, 2 intense but friendly dudes wandered up the alleyway.

‘Hey man this looks like a cool kind of place you know… a cool kind of place to get a burger and you know… party!’ said one of the dudes in a mix of French and South African accent.

We all went inside. The guy was still asking the audience questions.

I don’t know how this next bit happened. Someone just yelled out ‘let’s have a rap battle!’. And then somehow a rap battle started between Josel’s friend and one of the French/south African guy from the street. Beats were played though a phone into the mic and these guys started rapping. It was fucking sick!

I scanned the room and everyone had a similar look of ‘I don’t know what the fuck is going on but this is awesome’.

The show ended and I felt that wave of melancholy you get after you see a great movie or when you return from a holiday. Guerrilla is fucking awesome. Every Wednesday starting at 8pm (sign up at 7:30) at The Resistance Bar & Café Shop 6/672 Glenferrie Road Hawthorn 3122 Hawthorn, Victoria.

[deltaengineering]

summer anime 2017 part 1: we can rebuild it

This season isn’t very hot so far, but since I have a bunch of stuff carrying over, I’m not exactly complaining. Let’s go. We have three shows that share a curious theme, two that curiously do not, and one that’s actually good. Somehow that adds up to ten.

See also:

• part 2: bunch of fools

Battle Girl High School

We start the season with the possibly blandest title for an anime in quite a while. And the show itself easily manages to match the expectations the title raises: It's a high school with a bunch of girls that do battle. And by "a bunch" I mean more than I can offhandedly recall; the spiritual predecessor to this all-you-can-eat buffet of archetypes is clearly Girl Friend Beta (and it's also based on some waifu-collectathon mobile game) - only now with more magical girl henshins and hitting things with stupidly elaborate sticks. Oh and some of them are idols, because of course they are. Honestly there's nothing too objectionable in here, but it's just still an anonymous 24 minutes of mass manufactured anime-shaped packing peanuts.

Enmusubi no Youko-chan

...or "Fox Spirit Matchmaker". I've heard some positive rumblings about the quality of the source material in the run-up to this season, but that just goes to show that you can't trust people who read Chinese webcomics. Fox Spirit Matchmaker is a "romantic action comedy" (i.e., idiotic glutton/lecher guy and naive foxblob get matchmade by happenstance, hilarity and wuxia skirmishes ensue) of the kind that Japan thankfully got tired of a decade ago. The jokes are bad, the execution is so clumsy that they wouldn't land even if they were, and the action is pretty laughable too. There’s a whole bizarre universe that nobody could possibly give a fuck about around it as well, and boy does it want to tell you about it. If that sounds familiar: Why yes, Haoliners is indeed at it again and this is by no means their finest hour either.

Fate/Apocrypha

With the massive amounts of Fate spinoffs around, it can be quite hard to keep track. Apocrypha is an "alternative retelling" of a grail war in a world where Fate/Zero and subsequently Fate/stay night did not happen and everyone decides to have a team deathmatch in Romania instead. Among TRUE FATE MURDERHEADS Apocrypha is mostly known as "the really stupid one", or, if that is ambiguous (which it may well be, given that the competition includes gems such as “Fate, but on the moon”), "the one where one of the Casters is Shakespeare". It's Fate adapted to the sensibilities of a mid-2010 light novel, and while this gives it a certain... exuberance, I don't know if I really care for more slightly different Fate with no less than two Saberclones. The first episode certainly does not help because it spends half the time explaining what a grail war is (and everyone who knows Fate has heard that a hundred times), and the other half on how it's different from the main canon (and everyone who doesn't know Fate would not care about that in the slightest). I still feel tempted to find out how truly dumb this can get, but realistically it would have to be much, much better than it is for me to get over my severe Fate burnout.

Hina Logi - From Luck & Logic

Speaking of established (well, kinda) things getting retooled to other tastes, remember Luck & Logic? It was a pretty pedestrian battle harem that I only remember because it was made by Doga Kobo and looked pretty distinctly cool as a result. Well, now it has a sequel, even though you couldn't tell. Hina Logi goes out of its way to be as different as possible from L&L, and just to start with it's no longer a battle harem, but a Kirara imitator. Of course, the concept of superpowers injected into a cute girls doing fuck all anime would turn out to be mahou shoujo-ish, and the writing even points out how much an universe can change in just a few years - I see what you did there. Doga Kobo excels at exactly this type of show, so this just aligns the franchise more to their strengths, but even in this aspect there's a twist: it looks entirely different, more or less like the sort of glossy but unmemorable show JC Staff would churn out. In any case, I'm talking so much about this franchise mutation because it's really the only interesting thing about it; it's a basic Kiraralike, and you've seen these before. If you watched Hinako Note last season, you might also like Hina Logi. It has fights now.

Isekai Shokudou

The term "isekai" has turned into a very dirty word in the last few years. But one should not forget that it's still a perfectly normal word, and doesn't necessarily refer to the light novel subgenre that has grown around it like a tumor. Just because it's in the title, that doesn't mean Isekai Shokudou is also a light no- Well, okay, it is one. But! It's not in fact about an otaku shitter that gets hit by a car and is reborn in a world where nerds stuff the jocks into lockers with the power of nerd knowledge. Instead it's about a magic restaurant that sometimes connects to a fantasy world, and then the cook serves the fantasy creatures delicious Terran meals. He picks up a demon girl that has fallen on hard times as a waitress. By the way, said cook is voiced by Junichi Suwabe, and Suwabe + cute girl is a classic winning combination that almost managed to save Demi-chan on its own. So Isekai Shokudou is pretty damn cute, and it has a leisurely pace that makes it quite relaxing too. On top of that, it's also funny just because of the absurdity of its concept, without this being played for ha-ha comedy. You can still tell that there's a light novel underneath it by the characteristic over-reliance on flat exposition, but based on episode 1 alone, it's a charming little show and my first real pick of the season.

Kakegurui

Hey guys, do you like Kaiji? Do you like Prison School? Do you like crazy faces? Oh boy have I got the show for you. Kakegurui is about a high school where the entire student body is way into high-stakes gambling, and when the money runs out, there's always femdom to be had instead. Kakegurui is unabashedly sleazy and extremely over the top, and MAPPA bring a lot of skill in direction, animation, editing, music, etc. to the table as well. The thing is just... as ostentatious everything about it is, the core of the show isn't very convincing on a writing level. The gambling mindgames are actually far less complicated than the show would lead you to believe, and the characters are not very profound either when they're just tripping balls and going 150% crazy all the time. The show would need at least one of these to hold up in the long run, and it's not out of the question that it might acquire it; As it is, it's a cool wacky short movie but I have my doubts whether this can carry a whole TV show. But the production values are good enough to give it at least a chance.

Katsugeki/Touken Ranbu

And here we have the third radical reinterpretation of a source material: Touken Ranbu, the sword boyfriend simulator, already had an adaptation by Doga Kobo - and of course that was just Cute Swords Doing Cute Things. Now ufotable is doing their take on it, so it's, believe it or not, a lot like Fate UBW all of a sudden, character design, heavyhanded color correction, 3D CG effects and all - It's a real anime now, with things like plot and characters, and very competently made action show at that, and for some that may be enough. But not only that, it also has the tone and word vomit writing of Fate now, and that's where it gets sketchier. Without affinity for the source material, I find it hard to care about the exploits of big sword man and his small swordsexual life partner, and I care even less about their convoluted, nonsensical time travel scheme that gets explained way past the breaking point. And the action being great doesn't really matter if all they do is effortlessly style all over mass produced smoke monsters with a blade sticking out of them. I also can't shake the feeling that Doga Kobo's version was just a bit closer to the true fujo meaning of Touken Ranbu, if you know what I mean. K/tr seems watchable, but behind the premium production there just doesn't seem to be anything interesting.

Keppeki Danshi! Aoyama-kun

"Keppeki" means "neat freak", and congratulations, you have discovered The Joke. What if a neurotic germophobe was also an extremely talented soccer player? So many opportunities to make the same joke over and over again! It's really quite a shame that this one is so one-note, because the sports show holding it together is actually one of the better soccer anime I've seen - it has good direction and a good pace once the game is on. I also like that the character design looks a lot like ACCA’s. But overall there's not much of that and a lot of The Joke, and even the better bits (like the character design) are marred by egregious overuse of SD comedy that doesn't fit stylistically at all. If I wanted this kind of comedy, I'd rather watch Sakamoto desu ga, and not a less stylish Sakamoto desu ga with frustrating glimpses of a good soccer anime in between.

Knight's & Magic

So, about that isekai. What if I told you that Knight's (the apostrophe is important) & Magic is in fact about an otaku shitter that gets hit by a car and is reborn in a world where nerds stuff the jocks into lockers with the power of nerd knowledge? It's true! Knight's & Magic is probably not the worst of this ilk I've seen, but that's a largely academic distinction. In fact it's quite bizarre that it even is an isekai story; Yeah, a gunpla nerd gets reborn into a world where mechas are real (and it's a fantasy world, which doesn't really make much sense but hey, robots), but there's really no reason he couldn't have come from this world in the first place, especially since he literally gets reborn and we have to watch a boring series of timeskips throughout his whole childhood anyway. Maybe him being a programmer with pop culture hobbies just like you and me will become relevant eventually, but I really don't care to find out.

Youkai Apartment no Yuuga na Nichijou

And finally, here's a show that reminds us that Haoliners are not the only ones that can create an uncanny valley of competence that is eerily similar to "real" anime but not quite there. And this is a special case - usually this sort of production is attached to very bad ideas, but there's really nothing wrong with the story of a guy who moves into a house that turns out to be co-inhabited by ghosts and other assorted spiritual critters. Nothing, apart from everything: The directing is sluggish, the animation is conspicuously cheap, the writing takes forever just to get to the point that there's g-g-g-ghosts, and the characters are devoid of any personality apart from being scared/not being scared of the youkai menagerie. Do yourself a favor and watch Spirited Away again instead, because this bargain basement TV version with a high school loser up front has nothing to add and a lot to subtract.