Two visual novels I selected out as excellent works needing of a translation are getting a translation started this week -->
Tsui Yuri, which just came out a bit ago, so this is great news that people are so on the ball, and Hanasaki Work Spring, which only came out a couple months ago, by the famous Saga Planets company. Just imagine if all the great visual novels released in Japan also came out in English this swiftly. A bit different from the fate of Little Busters Ecstasy, huh?
Still, I hope these visual novels aren't translated too fast, take a few years or so, so I can catch up on Really? Really!, Majikoi S, and the rest of my endless backlog, why don't you? At this rate I'm going to drown in a sea of unread words.
Meanwhile, Code Geass's final Akito spinoff episode has come out in bluray, so now's the time to rewatch the spinoff from the beginning. The series makes a lot more sense if you don't watch it over the course of five years, but instead five days. You begin to remember the character's faces and positions, the story actually starts to gel together into a cohesive whole, and you can tell just what the heck is going on. Once you understand the people you can start to sympathize with them, and then the story actually becomes pleasant to watch instead of just bewildering.
Brave Witches is coming out this fall, so we finally get this year's dosage of Strike Witches coming our way. High School Fleet is no replacement for Strike Witches, even if they have the same character designer.
Supergirl is getting a 2nd season, this time supervised by the same CW people who are making Arrow, Flash and Legends of Tomorrow. Since they nailed all of the other shows, I'm sure they'll do a great job with Supergirl too. As such, I've had to revise my abandonment of season 1 and now I'm in the process of catching up on the show again. Supergirl isn't as good as, say, Arrow, but it does have some nice moments. When she was going all out against Red Tornado, or when she shot eye beams at her mother's hologram in frustration, there was an awful lot of soul in the show. It's not just campy fluff, these people have real heart rending emotions beneath it all. I hope the subsequent episodes live up to that level of performance. Supergirl is now part of the Arrow-verse and thus a part of my 10 must see western tv shows list.
In addition, the netflix marvel tv shows, which are also on that list, have been bumped up to the best non-sports programming out there. Better than Game of Thrones (which is too full of filler to take seriously anymore), Firefly (which was canceled too early), or Gilmore Girls (which for all its charm, doesn't have the Punisher shanking a dozen prisoners to death in a narrow hallway.) When all is said and done, the netflix Marvel tv shows will be longer than Game of Thrones and better executed, since they won't be constantly deviating from and returning to a fitfully released source material, but are able to chart their course from beginning to end into a coherent unified story.
The next Fairy Tail Gaiden, Laxus' story, is now in translation, so be sure to check that out.
Donald Trump is pretty much even in the polls with Hillary now. The debates will be decisive one way or the other.
On top of wanting to cancel the Olympics entirely, there are people calling solely for the exclusion of Russia from the Olympics. Because all Russian athletes should be banned from the Olympics due to the uncorroborated claims of one dissident talking about doping that occurred in Russia precisely because Russian officers could oversee everything that happened in Sochi and cover up whatever they liked, a situation that can't be repeated in Rio anyway so there's no danger of doping occurring this time around. The athletes of this summer Olympics have nothing to do with the alleged cheaters of the winter Olympics, and are often young gymnast girls who only have one shot at the Olympics in their entire lives. You're going to bar them because of what some biathlon expert did two years ago to advantage himself?
Everyone knows Russia's gymnasts are the most beautiful and the best, so barring Russia from the Olympics is the equivalent to just canceling the Olympics. Without the Russian gymnastics team, what's the bloody point?
This is intersectionality at its best. Not only are the Olympics hated by all the powers-that-be, so too are the Russians, both for equally fatuous reasons. This isn't about whether Russia doped or not. Maybe it did, maybe it didn't, but who cares? The entire Tour de France was doping when they finally caught out Lance Armstrong, who had been doping for decades. Was the USA banned from the Olympics as a result of their doping cyclists? Nope. I don't think so. This, like usual, is just about hurting Russia because we don't like what they did to support the separatist South Ossetians against the murderously tyrannical Georgians, or what they did to support the separatist Crimeans and East Ukrainians against the murderously tyrannical West Ukrainians.
Russia must be punished for saving the lives and freedoms of people who wish to be left alone because the tyrants who were trying to wipe them out and bring them to their knees were on our side. Whatever that means. Like the freaking Nicaraguan terrorists Reagan supported. We don't care about justice so long as they ally with us against Russia, and we're so amoral that when we don't get our way on the battlefield we start doing petty things to spite Russia like banning them from the Olympics, something that's never been done before, even at the height of the Cold War, when the USSR was crushing rebellions in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, or even when murdering millions of people in the Holodomor and the gulag archipelago. But defending South Ossetia and allowing Crimea to join the union after a referendum, just like Texas was allowed to join the USA, that's beyond the pale!
I doubt this hypocrisy will work anywhere outside the journalists of the USA. Everyone else can see through this blatant anti-Russian hysteria and no one else takes us seriously. Europe, for instance, when polled, says it has no interest in defending its NATO allies Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. They probably don't give a damn about Poland either. So the idea that they're going to, unprecedentedly, ban Russia from the Olympics over Donetsk and Luhansk is just absurd.
Two years from now they'll be complaining about the Russian-hosted World Cup and saying we should ban Russia from playing in it. Just you wait. The level of absurdity that is the frothing hatred of Russia in the USA has no limits. In the previous World Cup, the Russian team was set to advance into the next round until a laser pointer was used to blind the goalie during a corner kick, putting him out of position, which led to an immediate goal for the vile Algerians. The referee did nothing about this obvious, caught on tape crime. Even though the whole Russian team and the goalie were complaining about it to the ref before the corner kick even happened, he did not whistle the play dead. Nor did he call a foul and undo the goal after it was scored. Nor did FIFA review the tape and change the results after the game was over. Everyone just whistled and looked the other way, and Russia's world cup was over, despite actually winning the games on the field. Now they will want to steal Russia's next World Cup away from them as well, and every subsequent World Cup and Olympics experience as well, until they come to heel and become America's poodles in geopolitics.
It's disgusting that any sovereign nation could be treated in this way in the realm of sports, which are supposed to be in the spirit of neutrality and fair play, which are supposed to rise above our differences and let us compete on a level playing field as sportsmen. If I were Russia, I would have threatened nuclear annihilation if that Algeria game wasn't awarded to Russia, and I would have followed through with it if the issue weren't corrected. The same for if Russia is banned from these Olympics, or their World Cup hosting is snatched away from them before 2018. I'm so absolutely tired of this bullying, and the only way to stop it is the credible threat that you simply will not be bullied anymore. You cannot allow America to control your foreign policy and keep you from doing what you know is right and just, and letting them trample all over your rights as sportsmen until your foreign policy 'shapes up' is the same as letting them have complete power and control over the fate of the world. This is exactly how South Africa was bullied into giving up Apartheid, you cannot allow the same tactics to be allowed to succeed against yourself. A line must be drawn. If the world has to end just to prove your point that no, America doesn't automatically get its way on everything just because it says so, then so be it. A world that's enslaved to the unjust oppression of American tyranny is worse than a non-existent world anyway.
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