Zero no Tsukaima Volume 20 Complete:

I read the whole book in less than a day.  It featured lots of great romantic comedy nonsense between Saito, Tiffania and Louise.  I'm not sure the author meant to die with that as his last note, but that's how cancer works.  21 and 22 are based off of Noboru's notes for how he wanted the series to finish, much like Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series.

The good people of Baka Tsuki are currently working on translating volume 21, but each new volume tends to take years to translate, so there's no telling when we'll get to see the end of this series.   Presumably all of the dramatic reveals and intriguing plot twists will be found there.  But I actually think Zero no Tsukaima's strength was always in its romantic comedy moments, so I'm kind of happy Noboru was at least around to write volume 20.

My video game music playlists have solved the problem of remixes (at least until I tire of instrumental variations of the same theme), but the situation still isn't ideal.

For one thing, my 1 star list is a vestigial rump of its former self, composed solely of Tales songs (which goes against the original point of mashing all my video game music together in order to create exciting diverse interactions), and dramatically smaller in size than all my other playlists, measuring in at a mere 135 songs and 2 hours of playtime long.

It would be fine if I could just delete the playlist entirely, but there are genuinely good songs in this list, which I'd hate to never hear again.  And not just a few, more like the majority.  I listened through my 1 star list in the hopes of finding songs I can eliminate entirely, but clearly that isn't the solution for most of the songs stuck on this list.

Meanwhile, my 3 star music list is distressingly shorter than my 6, 5, 4, and 2 star lists.  Even though it has 700 songs like all the others, its songs are too short to compete and it ends up feeling like an incomplete collection compared to the others.

Progress comes from seeing things in new and ingenuitive manners, so in order to move forward I'm going to have to abandon the equality of song numbers for the sake of equality of song length.  If I add the remaining songs from my 1 star list to my 2 star list, I can take an equivalent number of my longest songs out of my 2 star list and use them to reinforce the 3 star list.  This would lift it over the 1 day barrier like all the others have already achieved.  It would also make all my songs part of diverse, multi-franchise playlists instead of being stuck in any further rump ghettos.  With the 1 star list abolished, I could rename my remaining playlists from 1 to 5 stars, which is more generally in keeping with orthodoxy (5 stars commonly denotes the best, but who has ever heard of six stars?).

So here's the new layout.  5 star - 700 songs.  4 star - 700 songs.  3 star - 700 songs.  2 star - 750 songs.  1 star - 750 songs.  All over a day's length in playtime.  3,600 songs in all.  A beautiful balance if I do say so myself.

I tried out the Arachnid manga but it wasn't any good either.  I'm now putting all my hopes on Hiro Mashima's new work after he finishes Fairy Tail.  Surely the mangaka behind the greatest manga on Earth can produce another great work next time around, even if it's only the 100th best.  Only then will my manga hall of fame reach its aesthetic ending of exactly 100 tales.