2024 in review, the year of editing:

2024 is the year I finished editing all of my various megaprojects -- my top 200 anime rankings, my 5,500 song music hall of fame, my 1,099 entry '100 Waifus' music playlist, my 'fictional character hall of fame' and '100 Waifus' itself.  I spent all year editing and proofreading and finally wrapped everything up right before year's end.

Let's start with anime:

2024 Year in Anime Reviewed:


How did 2024's great franchises stack up against each other and what were they?

1.  One Piece (Wano arc completed and Egghead arc begins)

2.  Fairy Tail 100 Years Quest

3.  Oshi no Ko S2

4.  Monogatari Series Off and Monster Season

5.  DanMachi S5

6.  Hibike! Euphonium S3

7.  Wonderful Precure + Precure All Stars F movie (finally translated)

8.  Sousou no Frieren (2nd cour)

9.  Girls Band Cry

10.  Love Live! Superstar S3

11.  Bleach TYBW part 3

12.  SAOAGGO S2

13.  Boku no Hero Academia S7

14.  Sokushi Cheat

15.  Ao no Hako (1st cour)

16.  Kimetsu no Yaiba S4

17.  Dragon Ball Daima (1st cour)

18.  Girls und Panzer das Finale ova 4 + taichou war

19.  Idolm@ster Shiny Colors

20.  Prince of Tennis U-17 World Cup Semifinal

21.  Spice and Wolf (2024) eps 20-25

22.  Kimi ni Todoke S3

23.  KonoSuba S3

24.  Uma Musume New Era movie

25.  Oomuro-ke oav

Three new great series isn't bad, especially this late in to anime's history, but 2024's saving grace was sequels to classic works.  Very classic works.  Works that date back to the 80's like Dragon Ball, 90's like One Piece, 00's like Bleach, Monogatari and Precure, and 10's like Love Live! and SAO.  For some reason there were very few shows with definitive endings -- Hibike! Euphonium and Girls Band Cry is basically it.  Love Live and Idolm@ster might end this particular group of characters, but they'll probably resume with some similar group like Precure always does.  So only three beginnings and only two endings, making this very much a bridging year.  Girls Band Cry stands out as particularly good precisely because it has a start and finish, something the rest of anime seemingly can no longer manage.

In addition to the 25 great anime that aired this year, many new 'good' (worth watching in full) anime also aired:

Saijaku Tamer

Dungeon Meshi

Henjin no Salad Bowl

One Room, Hi Atari Futsu, Angel Included

Yoru no Kurage

Dorei Elf no Yome

Seiyuu Radio ura no Omote

Tensei Kizoku

Shuumatsu Train

Sasayaku You ni Koi wo Utau

The Boy and the Heron

Isekai Suicide Squad

Nanare Hananare

Terminator Zero

Code Geass: Rose the Recapture

Too many losing heroines

Mob Kara Hajimaru

Atri My Dear Moments

The Elusive Samurai

Alya Sometimes Speaks in Russian

Wistoria of Wand and Sword

Failure Frame

Koi wa Futago de Warikirenai

Isekai Yururi Kikou

Naze Boku no Sekai wo Daremo Oboeteinai no ka?

I Parry Everything

Sora no Aosa wo Shiro Hito yo

Hitoribochi Isekai

Nageki Bourei

Chiyushi Tsuiho

Nina the Starry Bride

31 new series or movies isn't bad.  Anime was still in a healthy state in 2024.  My worries aren't for 2024 or 2025, when there's still more Bleach, Fairy Tail and Kimetsu left to animate, it's for what comes after that.

Though it wasn't me doing the editing, anime received two vital edits this year as well -- all of Precure came out in an English subtitled bluray version, and all of One Piece came out in a fan-edited condensed version.  I'll be enjoying these two edits well into 2025.

At the start of 2024 there were some obviously undeserving ranked anime like Kamitachi and 16bit Sensation.  At the end of 2024 every anime in my top rankings was obviously deserving of those rankings.  There are only 18 ranked series left that have the twin faults of only being 12 episodes long and lacking a decisive conclusion.  I've had a 'top 200' rankings for a long time but the average level of those ranked series has continuously risen all this time, until today where the quality is nearly perfect.  The only new series that's likely to enter my rankings from here is Summer Pockets in 2025.  But they butchered Rewrite so there's not even a guarantee that Summer Pockets will qualify.

The next megaproject was my music hall of fame.  Thanks to games like Heaven Burns Red, Terra Wars, Fantasy Life, Unicorn Overlord and Granblue Fantasy Re:link, as well as various new anime theme releases, I was able to replace around 100 songs in my music hall of fame.  The new songs are much better than the old, which were either merged into longer songs because they were too short to stand on their own, or deleted entirely because they were never worth listening to.  The purge was important, but there was also a purge within each song, as I used the new Audacity music editing tool to get rid of the most offensive portions of otherwise good songs.  This improved the quality of my music yet again in an almost invisible manner, since the same song titles remained before and after.

In addition I fixed the ratings of hundreds of songs by promoting or demoting them.  At least 25 new songs entered my 5-star tier, the most important tier, since I listen to it about as often as all the rest of the music combined.

The most impressive aspect of all this editing is I managed to keep my song total at exactly 5,500 and five evenly distributed tiers of 1,100 throughout.  Keeping things stable sounds easy but it was by far the hardest part.

I finally reached a stable conclusion to all my edits at the end of the year, but the release of the Fairy Tail 100 Years Quest ost on Christmas day means 2025 will also include music editing.  I plan on kicking out subpar Valkyrie Profile songs to make room for the new crop.  But at least for now the year of constant turmoil is complete, and the remaining changes required are marginal compared to the tsunami of edits 2024 saw.

Through heroic attention to detail, I managed to match a good song with every featured fictional character in '100 Waifus,' creating a playlist of maximal nostalgia which I can enjoy long after I tire of reading the book.  Now I can listen to a song and enjoy not only the song but also the character it represents, reflecting back on how cute or cool that character was from whatever story they came from.

The new permapost, 'Wonderful Fictional Characters,' is also a chance to reflect back upon and honor all the best people from the best stories, but this time unbound by the conflicting needs of the '100 Waifus' novel.  It can focus on its sole priority, honoring the right people, and thus is a slightly better version of the same idea that is embedded within the book.

By far the most work I did this year was editing '100 Waifus' itself, though.  I did add a few pages of bonus content, like Christopher's date with Levy in Chapter 11, and Cheria's new scene in Chapter 31, which are incredibly good.  But the edits were generally far more mundane and thankless than that.  Most of the time I was paring back the superabundance of the words 'just,' 'even,' and commas.  I was rephrasing sentences into intelligible English so readers weren't tripped up by them or put off by how bad they sounded, or deleting them entirely because they weren't actually necessary.  I was correcting outright spelling and grammar errors, or details about characters which were straight wrong.  (Because I use characters from other works, I don't have control over what is correct about them, which means I have to be extremely diligent in matching my story's details to the official canon.)  I was improving the children's names by replacing them with new children from new works, and increasing the number of unique names in the book so that they were easier to remember for the reader.  I was improving the relationship between mothers and children by matching them more intelligently.  So many of the edits at first glance are invisible, but when taken all together they transform the book to a whole new level of satisfaction.  I want the book to be as easy to read as listening to normal daily conversation, while being as profound and meaningful as Kant or Plato.  Thanks to the eight editing sessions I did across this entire year, I've reached that goal.

Part of the pleasure of reading has nothing to do with content and everything to do with delivery.  A well delivered twist or turn of phrase, with alliteration or parrallelism or whatever, can be enjoyed independently of whatever is going on in the story.  It's like sweetening the pot, adding in little rewards for the effort involved in traversing such a long tome, making it so that even impatient, immature minds can be bribed into reading a little bit further, a little bit longer.  If you dope/spike/spice your book with enough of these witticisms, you might get the reader all the way to the end of the story.  I know rereading the book this time was a lot easier than it was a year ago.  I felt far less exhausted at the finish line than I had been previously.  Part of that was because I didn't have to make many edits, and part of that was the fruit of past editing.  Editing equals exhaustion for the author, but exhilaration for the reader.  I finally got to benefit from the flip side of that equation.

Finishing 'In Another World With 100 Waifus' after six years and 47 tries is such a monumental event that nothing else in 2024 really matters in comparison.  But I'll try to summarize the other important moments of the year nonetheless.

As mentioned before, there were several great video games released this year -- FF7 Rebirth, Unicorn Overlord, Granblue Fantasy Re:Link and Heaven Burns Red (now ranked 23rd in my great video game rankings).  There was also a new expansion of World of Warcraft I enjoyed well enough.  In any other year I would have described this as the year of great games.  I loved Unicorn Overlord so much I replayed it twice at the highest difficulty.  I kept searching for an excuse not to put it down.  FF7 Rebirth and Heaven Burns Red made me cry.  I don't think 2025 will have as many good games as 2024, and I still expect 2025 to be the year of video games.

As for manga, many great or at least good series came to an end, including Kodomo Natchaimashita, Datenshi Ron, Isekai Shihai no Skill Taker, Fire Emblem Record of the Holy War, Mikakunin de Shinkoukei, Oshi no Ko, Kimi ni Todoke ~ Soulmate ~, Ken Tensei Another Wish, Broken Blade and Edens Zero.

For books not titled '100 Waifus,' I actually read quite a few.  Most importantly Solzhenitsyn's Red Wheel volume 6, but also more Bakemonogatari, Haruhi, Parchment & Wolf, Ryuuou no Oshigoto, Choyoyu (the all important ending), Index GT, Sokushi Cheat, KonoSuba (including the ending), and Kamitachi (which I'd rather forget about.)

As for visual novels I enjoyed the beautiful Irotoridori no Sekai and the raunchy Majikoi Ryouken After, but overall the pickings were far too sparse.  On the other hand you could classify Heaven Burns Red as a visual novel in which case things were fine.  There was also a very sexy but otherwise empty visual novel called 'Life with a flirty Step-sister.'  Like Imouto Paradise it doesn't worry about plot and gets right to the point, which is that imoutos reign supreme.

There was one great new tv series, Shogun, and 1/2 of a great new movie, Dune part 2.  So much for America's contribution to great art.  And Shogun is about Japan featuring mostly Japanese actors, so you could call it a Japanese work too. . .

Sports were fun this year, with the Kansas City Chiefs winning an improbable second Super Bowl in a row and the beginning of the College Football Playoff system.  The Paris 2024 Olympics were beautiful and had many satisfying results like Djokovic's tennis gold or Suni Lee's gymnastics bronze.  Unfortunately the Olympics were tainted by politics so we didn't get to see Russia compete.

Which brings things to politics.  The best event of 2024 was the Republicans sweeping the House, Senate and Presidency in the election.  Starting in 2025 Republicans will have total power and have the chance to turn around this desperately troubled country.  We can grow the economy, shrink the deficit, reduce crime and illegal immigration, make peace instead of war abroad, restore justice and dismantle the deep state.  For the first time Trump has over 50% approval and a true popular mandate, including the majority of young people and large numbers of racial/ethnic minorities.  He's President of all of America this time around.

Meanwhile Russia scored several major victories in their just war against Ukraine and the united west which supports Ukraine.  They took the fortress city of Avdiivka and then spread from there all the way to the city limits of Pokrovsk.  They took the fortress city of Ugledar and then spread up to Kurakhove.  They are very close to taking two more fortress cities, Chasiv Yar and Toretsk, which if they manage to do will spell the death knell for the Donbass area as a whole.  For some bizarre reason Ukraine didn't try hard to defend their own soil and instead invaded Kursk, which only led to them getting massive casualties and a few hamlets and trees.  The war really couldn't have gone any better this year, with gains as dramatic as we saw during Russia's initial invasion.

There were no good guys in Syria and there are still no good guys in Syria so despite things changing on the surface really nothing has changed here.  The civil war continues, just with new actors.

The war between Israel (and the USA) and a variety of Muslims continues, but it does look like Israel has gained the upper hand.  Less important than the results of the war are the lessons that can be learned from the war, though.  What the world learned is that genocide isn't a real crime, invading and annexing territory isn't a real crime, attacking U.N. peacekeepers or charity workers isn't a real crime, the only thing that goes against the 'rules-based order' is defying America.  And in a more universal, abstract sense, the only war crime is losing a war.  If you win a war everything you do is blessed by history.  Israel has gotten away with absolutely everything, which means anyone else who wins could do the same.  If you defeat America, you become the 'rules-based order,' which means you weren't in violation of the rules-based order after all.  I expect many nations have learned the right lessons from this war, including China, and I'm looking forward to seeing the hypocritical lying tyrannical America knocked off its high horse.  Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but someday.

I wrote some good political posts for this very blog this year, like '2/3rds of South Korean Women don't want children,' 'the party of life versus the party of death,' '45% of American women aged 25-44 are expected to be single and childless by 2030', and '100 Waifus is just saying what all men feel out loud,' which were added to my permaposts, but there's little to say that I haven't said before, so mostly I focused on tilling the fields in front of me, the things I could control myself.  I like to think that my political posts contributed at least slightly to Trump's victory, though.

Overall 2024 was a great year.  Basically everything went my way.  Even my stocks went up.  I spent the entire year working hard and producing results, something I doubt I'll ever do again.  (It was a lot of work, I don't want to do that ever again.)  I'm going to enjoy the fruits of my labor during 2024 for many years to come.  Honestly, I think I'll enjoy the fruits of my labor this year in heaven, and the fruits will be even more rewarding then, but even on Earth the rewards are plentiful.  I expect 2025 to be an even better year, with more Russian victories, including the complete capitulation of Ukraine, more Republican triumphs that improve life in the USA, more thrilling NFL Playoff games, more thrilling College Football Playoff games, more anime endings, more manga endings, more video games, more visual novels (like Kud Wafter and Rewrite Harvest Festa), more everything.

There won't be an Olympics or World Cup next year, but with the blizzard of other things going on I don't think anyone will notice or care.