Portamento:

Mami Kawada has another excellent song embedded within the 4th episode of Shakugan no Shana S.  Its name is 'portamento.'  Maybe that's portmanteau but spelled wrong?  But in any case that's the name.  After listening to it over 100 times it qualified for a 5-star rating, giving Mami Kawada another 16 points and putting her in my top 30 composers.  To make room everyone else had to get bumped down one, starting with Masaharu Iwata's 'beginning of tale' from Ogre Battle going down to 4-star.  I thought the song jumped around too much and the instruments were primitive and shrill which also hurt it.

The other songs were demoted purely for their excessive length as is custom, eventually flinging 'fix me now' by Garbage out of the hall of fame entirely.  All the updated ratings and songs can be found at my 'Good Music' permapost.

I'm well on my way to winning the Verdant Wind arc of Fire Emblem yet again.  This will result in me having a nice even two powerful battalions from each arc -- Supreme Armored Corps, King of Lions Corps, Immortal Corps, making up for the battalions I permanently lost when I suffered casualties fighting Edelgard and Rhea in previous runthroughs.  This time I decided to focus on pure power, making all my mages Gremories so that they can have as high magic power and thus killing power as possible.  In addition Byleth is a war master so he crits everything he aims at.  You don't need stealth if you can kill everything that approaches you before they ever reach you.

A decent new manga has appeared, Genkai Koe no Tenpu wa, Tensei-sha ni Shika Atsukaenai.  The reincarnated kid has a cheat ability, but he still has weaknesses and most of the benefit is mental, not physical, so he still has to watch his step.  Plus he started as a discriminated against skinny slave so he needs the cheat power just to break even in a world so deadset against him.  The manga is based off of an award-winning web novel from the Sousetsuka site.

I've completed two of the four new routes in Summer Pockets Reflection Blue.  Shiki and Nomiko.  Their situations were too supernatural and too conveniently suited for a boy to rescue them.  Most of Summer Pockets isn't actually that good, it was only ever the Alka route that mattered.  So I guess I should have expected for the new content of Reflection Blue to not be that good either.  The next route I'm aiming for is the new Umi route though, so it should be as good as the best.