Shikkakumon Start!:

Shikkakumon is one of the anime I rated before it even started airing, a practice I had to take in order to get all my movie-length anime out of my top anime rankings while still retaining a 'top 200' list.  But now its first episode has aired and it enters my top anime rankings totally legitimately from henceforward.

The anime is hurrying things along, but that's okay, nothing important is lost in the transition.  The voice acting and art are decent and it isn't veering into filler, that's all I was worried about before the first episode aired.  Now that I know they did a good job and they're faithful to the source I'm confident Shikkakumon will earn its place in my rankings.  By the end it might be ranked a little higher than 194 too.

Meanwhile, I finished vetting all my Nobuo Uematsu music, demoting lots more FF9 songs to make room for lots more Yoko Shimomura songs from Legend of Mana and Radiant Historia --  Song of Mana, Cliff Town Gato, The Darkness Nova, Irwin on Reflection, Pain the Universe, An Earnest Desire of Grey and Mechanical Kingdom.  I also promoted a couple more Yuki Kajiura songs to 5-star, Godsibb and Promised Pain, at the expense of Doomsday by Junichi Nakatsuru and Go!! by FLOW.

Now everything I felt deserved to be 5-star is 5-star.  It took a painful resolution to cut anything that even hinted of weakness from the 5-star list to make room, but the overall result is a vast improvement.  Yuki Kajiura and Yoko Shimomura deserved way more credit than they initially received.  And Uematsu, still with 223 songs in the 5-star hall of fame, will barely notice a difference.  He's still doing just fine.

Thanks to the extra points awarded to Yuki she moved ahead of Naoshi Mizuta to my 7th favorite composer.  Yoko is still stuck at 5th place even with all the extra points, the gulf between her and 4th place Hitoshi Sakimoto is insurmountable.  But with 1540 points at least it's more proper to include her as a member of the 'big 5' instead of ignore her and talk of the 'big 4.'  She really is splendid.

For people in need of a refresher, here's what the top ten composers by quality x quantity points look like now:

Nobuo Uematsu: 5136

Yasunori Mitsuda: 2949

Motoi Sakuraba: 2481

Hitoshi Sakimoto: 2413

Yoko Shimomura: 1540

Masaharu Iwata: 693

Yuki Kajiura: 581

Naoshi Mizuta: 566

Yasunori Nishiki: 496

Jun Maeda: 482

Next month Heaven Burns Red by Jun Maeda will come out, at which point he'll surely pass Nishiki and get to 9th place, but at least with all my sorting done things will remain stable until then.

I've also started re-reading and re-editing '100 Waifus' for the 31st time.  So far I've corrected a nickname into a proper name, gotten rid of an unnecessary comma and improved the phrasing of a few lines.  All very minor issues but already more edits than I did on the 30th, so the decision has already proven itself productive.

The intersection between my Good Music work and my '100 Waifus' work came together for one particular edit -- I substituted praise for the song Scarborough Fair to praise for the song Inflate Pocket, because Inflate Pocket is a 5-star song and Scarborough Fair is merely a 4-star.  Now Christopher is praising a genuinely good song instead of an 'above average song,' which is hardly worth singling out.  Again I was unconsciously giving affirmative action to western music and again I've consciously corrected the issue by adhering to strict objective standards.

Until I play Tales of Arise '100 Waifus' can never be completed, but that doesn't mean I can't keep improving it in the meantime.  So long as I find things to edit re-reading it will always be a good idea.

I've also finished rewatching One Pace's Whole Cake Island arc.  It was really good, simultaneously funny and cool and emotional in twist after twist.  Pudding, Carrot and Nami were all very pretty.  Big Mom is the most villainous villain of all time, but watching the heroes get the best of her was very satisfying.  All that's left in my One Piece rewatch is the still-incomplete Wano arc.