This show just isn't interesting. The plot is rehashed, the characters don't stand out, and the setting is blah. There's a lot of attempts at humor but they all fall flat. The best thing about the show is that it regularly strips the protagonist, but even then it doesn't actually show anything.
There's nothing particularly wrong with Marchen Madchen, but there's nothing to keep your attention about it either. After three episodes it's clear this show isn't going to do anything interesting ever.
By reaching 3 episodes watched, the show did manage to climb onto my mediocre board. That marks the 650th anime I've seen at least three episodes of, or in full if it's shorter than that in length. It used to be that the top third of the series on that board automatically qualified as great anime, but my standards gradually grew tougher and now 650 mediocre shows doesn't even make for 200 great ones. Maybe someday.
Mp3gain is a godsend. It really does work just as advertised, normalizing the volume of all your various songs. But nothing is ever perfect. Some songs for some reason were bugged and couldn't be changed by Mp3gain.
Classical music seems to have a general problem in that Mp3gain can't get the songs loud enough. This is because classical has a larger volume range than most songs, and it normalizes to the loudest moment in the song -- so if there's a lot of quiet and one loud moment, the classical music is still basically impossible to hear, even after Mp3gain's surgery. You can offset this weakness partially by using the internal itunes slider to double the volume for classical songs, but even then it usually isn't enough. Well, it's still better than nothing.
There's also the problem that my internal itunes volume settings weren't changed when I used Mp3gain, so I was now overcorrecting a problem Mp3gain had already solved. I had to go back and reset to neutral all my itunes slider settings to get things back in line. And sometimes itunes is incredibly stubborn about changing its settings and 'forgets' you changed them the moment the song ends. I found that with sufficient fiddling you can find a workaround to this obnoxious bug, but really it shouldn't exist in the first place. Itunes is such a trash program. >.<.
Well, teething issues aside, I think I've accomplished a major upgrade with this wonderful new app. Instead of having to constantly fiddle with the volume, I can leave the volume steady and unchanged for hours at a time, only occasionally having to intervene in the case of a bug. I can already feel the stress of managing my playlist floating away. If you want a music hall of fame, you're going to need Mp3gain to accompany it, I just don't see any other practical way to have all these songs on the same even playing field.
I auditioned the music from FF Legend 1 + 2 for my hall of fame, early works by Uematsu, but the game boy's capabilities as a music player are so deficient that even with good melodies it ended up being unacceptably bad music. I ran across the exact same problem with Knight of Lodis -- great themes, terrible hardware. Someone should orchestrate these works so that people can truly enjoy them. How expensive would it be to get a high school orchestra to play real instruments for these songs? This doesn't seem like a mistake the world should allow to live on.
Everywhere I look I see easy ways to improve the world, but no one ever listens to me so nothing ever changes. It's very frustrating.
It turns out Dolores O'Riordan committed suicide via fentanyl overdose. She had everything you could ever want in life, including a husband and three kids, fame, talent, fortune, and glory. None of it mattered and she killed herself anyway. Some brains are just wired wrong, clearly. It's a shame all these blessings were wasted on such a loser.
Kyoukai no Rinne's manga is being published in English by an official company, slowly but surely, so that's one manga we don't have to lament not being able to see the ending to.
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