Konohana Kitan Dropped:

I suspected this from the start, but an anime that relies entirely on looks can only go so far.  The straw that broke the camel's back was when the show started taking shortcuts with its art, the only thing it ever had going for it.  Once it turned its back on lavish, gorgeous detail in favor of blobs and stick figures, there was nothing left to see.  That brings the fall season down to 14 shows.

I no longer believe Anime-Gataris will make my rankings, either.  The stupid talking cat ruins any shot the show had at greatness.  There's absolutely zero reason for it to exist, it's completely extraneous to the plot, and if it ever became central to the plot it would only be because the story completely genre-shifted from slice of life to something else, thus destroying what I liked about the story in the first place.  There's no way out due to that cat, the show will be stupid one way or another.  Other aspects are still good, so I'll keep watching, but great?  Nyet.

At least Spider Man: Homecoming was good.  I thought Vulture was a pretty cool villain, and the movie as a whole was very lighthearted and funny.  I rank it just below Ant Man, which was even funnier.  It's definitely a must see.

All this time my music hall of fame has been incomplete because my giant cd collection was unusable because modern computers don't play cd's.  I finally took the plunge and hooked up an old computer, ripped any of my cd's I thought might have some potential, and then transferred the files to my new computer where I could integrate them with the rest of my itunes songs.

The only problem is all the songs were originally labelled as 'unknown title, unknown artist, unknown album.'  That's all I had to work with due to the wonders of ripping.  Using windows media player, I was able to auto-identify the albums via a cool matchup system.  After that it just came to working out the kinks, lots of copy and pasting from windows media player over to itunes, and I had my music collection back, now in modern form.

Next off came the actual judging of the salvaged music.  As much as I love my old nostalgic cd collection, it has to pass the same rigorous testing as Valkyrie Profile or anybody else to reach my hall of fame.

So far I've judged The Beatles, Ranma 1/2, Peter Schilling, Bjork's Selmasongs, Celtic Woman's Christmas Album, Depeche Mode, Green Day, the complete soundtrack to Crest/Banner of the Stars (my hall of fame currently only features a few scattered gems from this marvelous composer), Nine Inch Nails, Nirvana, No Doubt, Placebo, Simon & Garfunkel, and The Smashing Pumpkins.  Since this just comes from my cd collection, it isn't meant to be a review of their entire discographies, but just the music I grew up with and am sentimentally attached to from each of these bands.  It's possible there's good songs I don't know about from these bands, but what's important to me is having the music from my past circulating in the present once again.  I figure any song by these bands can act as a synechdoche for all of the others, anyway, since really not that much changes from song to song, so including any of a band's oeuvre is equivalent to honoring their entire oeuvre.

Still to come:  Stabbing Westward (currently my Hall of Fame only has one song from this band, but that will soon change.), U2, the Parasite Eve ost (by the illimitable Yoko Shimomura), and the Noir ost (by the luminous Yuki Kajiura).  I already have some Noir songs in my hall of fame, but like with Crest of the Stars, I now have the exhaustive list instead of just a few scattered specimens.

I wouldn't be surprised if I ended up with 100+ new entries to my music hall of fame by the time this is all over.  But for now I'll hold off on any updates until I've finished judging the entirety of my salvaged music.  This will be a big boost to my boy rock contribution to my hall of fame, which previously was rather embarrassingly scanty, but even this time around the predominant number of hits will be music from anime and video games.  Japan just makes better music than the west, especially boy bands from the west, so it can't be helped.