Ukraine is a terrorist state and pro-Ukrainians are terrorists:

Let's be clear.  The Prime Minister of Slovakia was shot five times today in an attempted assassination by a 71 year old leftist who didn't like Fico's neutral stance on Ukraine.  Neutral isn't good enough.  If you don't hand over your entire GDP to Ukraine you'll be assassinated by terrorists.  This is the new rule going forward in the west.  Sky News reported the event like it was the doings of a vigilante superhero with full approval.

This is the problem with piling up so many false facts as to the nature of reality.  Eventually it becomes a logical necessity to assassinate your Prime Minister, or nuke Moscow, or end the entire world.  When you keep claiming Russia is 'brutal and unprovoked, brutal and unprovoked,' then of course being neutral towards someone so 'brutal and unprovoked' is equally abominable and unforgivable.  And then when you claim 'Russia won't stop at Ukraine, Russia won't stop at Ukraine,' of course any Slovakian patriot will realize that killing their Prime Minister is a necessary act of self-defense, because Slovakia's sole chance of stopping a Russian invasion is supporting Ukraine to the hilt and winning the war before it reaches their doorstep.

The terrorist isn't the 71 year old idiot who even failed to get the job done.  The terrorists are the people who put these ideas in his head.  All he did is the logically necessary act that follows from such assertions.  It's ridiculous to claim this person is a particularly bad person who did something wrong -- he has no criminal history and considers himself a hero, as does most of the West.  There's nothing unique or outlandish about him.  What matters is the ideas in his head.  And who put those ideas into his head?  Who is disseminating them?  Who is continuously repeating them like a hypnotic device?

Since 2014 the state of Ukraine has been an illegitimate, unelected body that took power in a coup.  They immediately started massacring innocent civilians in Odessa, Luhansk and Donetsk who objected to this illegal power grab.  Their origin is based around terrorism.  When Russia made an amazingly good deal with them -- that they could keep Luhansk and Donetsk and their coup-government would be recognized as legitimate if they simply respected the wellbeing of their Russian-speaking population -- they then immediately violated it from day one.  They admitted that they had no plans to ever fulfill the treaty they signed and were simply using it as a time to rearm so that they could start massacring more of their own citizens again in the future.  Their president bragged about intentionally targeting kindergartens in Luhansk and Donetsk with unrelenting shelling, which never stopped, even though obviously part of the Minsk peace agreement was the end of hostilities.

When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, it was a preemptive act of self-defense, given that Zelensky had already declared his intentions to steamroll over the people of Luhansk and Donetsk, develop nuclear weapons, and retake Crimea from Russia, a province that had already joined Russia in a referendum and was now as much a part of Russia as Moscow or St. Petersburg.  When a country announces it is going to invade you and take your land, and then mobilizes a gigantic army and places it on your border, what choice do you have but to respond?

After Russia's invasion, it turned out all the places Russia's military went were actually pro-Russian, wishing to be a part of Russia, so actually Russia hadn't taken a single step into Ukraine's 'sovereign territory.'  It was all stolen land that belonged to Russia and had voted for Russia to begin with.  So actually Russia never crossed Ukraine's borders at all.  It's unclear how much of Ukraine actually wishes to be part of this coup government, since elections have been canceled and the dictator Zelensky has banned any political party or press organ or even church from opposing him.  American citizens who stream videos critical of Zelensky are arrested and tortured to death without even bothering to go through a trial.  People all over the world who simply voice support for Russia are made assassination targets, including the daughters of philosophers.  In an environment like that, it's impossible to know who actually supports Ukraine versus who is just afraid of the gestapo.

And gestapo isn't even a metaphor, since the government of Ukraine officially honors their Nazi past and puts up statues to the Nazi SS war criminal Stepan Bandera, mass murderer of Poles and Jews.  They also wear patches and emblems from their Nazi days and indoctrinate their children to 'heil Hitler.'  I wouldn't have believed it except I saw a video of a classroom teacher leading his kids in the Nazi salute and chant myself.  The highest echelons of government, like Zelensky and Zaluzhny, are seen posing with the explicitly Nazi divisions like Azov and giving them medals and government positions.  These Nazi militias were described as Nazis by the western press all the way leading up to 2022, so this is completely not up for debate.

In any case, presumably there is some point where the word 'invasion' would make sense, but we haven't reached it yet.  So far every advance of the Russian military has solely and only been a 'liberation.'  Furthermore, just as it is appropriate for Russia to march all the way to Paris to defeat Napoleon, it is perfectly within Russia's rights to march anywhere in Ukraine it takes to end the evil Banderite regime.  Once a war starts the only way to end it is to stamp out all embers of opposition, regardless if whether the people there support their evil government or not.

While Russia was fighting this war in self-defense, and while Russia was saving the people of Donetsk and Luhansk from a planned Nazi genocide, which the United Nations has formalized as the 'right to protect,' which authorized all the American interventions in Kosovo, Bosnia, Libya, etc., they took care to cause fewer civilian casualties than any other recorded war in history.  All while Ukraine attempted to maximize the number of Russian civilian casualties by deliberately targeting Russian civilians with all manner of precision weapons, including banned cluster munitions they promised not to use in civilian areas.  This continuous act of war crime terrorism is still happening every single day with weapons provided to Ukraine by the west, making the west complicit in every terror attack.  The west knows exactly where the missiles they give end up, and yet they keep giving new missiles to Ukraine.  There is no difference between shooting a missile yourself and giving a missile to someone you know will shoot it at civilians.  It's like transferring a rock from your right hand to your left and then throwing it, and then saying 'I didn't do it, it was my left hand!'  Russia would already be within their rights to nuke Ukraine and the entire west to ashes -- if we can target their civilians then they can target ours.  But heroically, in Christ-like fashion, they have turned their cheeks over and over again and allow this continuous terrorist slaughter to go without reprisal.  Russia still to this day only targets Ukrainian military targets and tries to win in the cleanest war in world history.

To make clear how cleanly this war is being fought, Russia has caused fewer civilian casualties in its war with the entire West than Israel has caused against the people of Gaza.  Not out of weakness, it has more nuclear weapons than anyone else on Earth, and hypersonic missiles that can deliver any payload anywhere they want.  Out of pure Christian goodness.

These are the facts.  All these facts are checkable and none are in dispute.  So when you start spinning these facts with ridiculous adjectives like 'brutal and unprovoked,' when you claim without any evidence that Russia is doing all sorts of war crimes, when you label Putin a war criminal for the ridiculous charge of kidnapping children (i.e., evacuating them from the threat of Ukrainian shelling), when you claim without any evidence that Russia desires to conquer Ukraine, no, the entire world, out of generalized hatred for freedom and democracy -- while Russia holds democratic elections and Ukraine doesn't -- you get 71 year olds shooting their Prime Ministers.

If you distort reality thoroughly enough to make one side pure evil, deserving of death, and the other side pure good, angelic freedom fighters who are saving us, not even themselves, but us from certain enslavement or death -- terrorism becomes a logical necessity.  The only strange thing is that even more of this isn't happening.  Anyone who implants into someone else's head the necessity of terrorist acts is himself the terrorist.  The cat's paw is just another victim and honestly shouldn't even be punished.  I bet the leftist could be rehabilitated in a couple days if only any honest person would tell him the truth about Ukraine.  The real culprits are the press.  Like always.  The media is behind everything.  The media is the enemy of the people and the cause of all suffering on Earth.  If the media hadn't drummed up support for Ukraine all across the west, they never would have dared to go to war with Russia in the first place, and this entire slaughter could have been avoided.  They could have just followed the Minsk accord from the beginning and everyone would have been happy.

This world is plagued by lies, not men.  Men are well intentioned, all trying to be heroes, all trying to do the right thing.  But the lies are everywhere, controlling everything.  It's like Saint Paul said, 'For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.'

Meanwhile, Eiyuuden Chronicles has finally released a patch fixing the bug that ate my save.  That's nice, but I've already moved on to other tasks -- rewatching Pretty Cure and re-reading '100 Waifus' for the 42nd time.  I'll get back to Eiyuuden when I have the time.  For now I'm halfway through '100 Waifus' and still haven't found anything in need of editing.  Hopefully the second half will be the same and I can finally declare the book complete.  I promised to keep rereading the book until I found nothing wrong with it, so here we go.  Here is my chance to fulfill that promise once and for all.

So far I'm loving the book, which should come as no surprise to anyone.  But reading it in paperback with everything properly edited is a real treat.  The sex scenes are as sexy as ever, actually more sexy than ever because somehow the paperback version feels more real than the electronic version.  The sweet or funny vignettes of the various girls getting along with Christopher each in their own special way constantly put a gentle smile on my face.  The minigame of remembering the origin of each and every name is fully in session and still engaging.  And the political arguments for why things are better on Eden than on Earth are as irrefutable and persuasive as ever.  They couldn't be phrased any better.

Speaking of well phrased arguments, I'm proud of my "Kanojo, Okarishimasu" post which came out long ago but may as well have been written yesterday, since it's as relevant as ever.  I should add it to my 'Women' permapost, even if it overlaps with other sections already present.

While I'm at it I'm listening to my music hall of fame.  I finished listening to the 2-star tier and have moved on to the 3-star tier, trying to find songs I can promote or demote for the sake of greater rating accuracy.  With sufficient 'demotion' slots pre-arranged I could fit in the soundtrack of Eiyuuden Chronicles while maintaining my 5,500 song balance, with five tiers of 1,100 songs each.  That's the plan at least, but first Eiyuuden's soundtrack would have to become available somewhere.  I'm still waiting on that too.

My Pretty Cure rewatch is heating up as I'm at the mid-season climax.  This is the traditional point where new Pretty Cure join the fold, villains are defeated, etc.  Watching all the seasons at once, all at their crescendo, is super fun.  It's obvious Pretty Cure deserves to be my 4th favorite anime, the only real question is whether it should be #1. . .

Minori and Ai:

I've added two more characters to my fictional character hall of fame, Minori from Pretty Cure Splash Star and Ai from Oshi no Ko.

Minori has a pretty big role in Splash Star, as this is a series of 50 episodes and only two Pretty Cure -- meaning the little sister of a Pretty Cure actually has a lot of scenes.  And every scene with Minori is moving and memorable, the essence of what makes art great.  Minori is very pretty, but what I like most about her is how realistic she feels.  This is the best representation of a young little sister in fiction.  She adores and copies her Onee-san, is bright and kindhearted, but still overconfident in her abilities and emotionally unstable, which often causes trouble for herself or others.  She exudes the potential to grow up into a great girl and her heart is in the right place so it's impossible to be mad at her, but she's not actually there yet.

There have never been sister Pretty Cure, even after all these seasons.  It's a shame because Minori would have been a perfect one.

Ai isn't a little sister but a mother of the main characters.  Clearly she made mistakes somewhere along the way, but it wasn't her fault the boy she loved turned out to be a murderous shitbag.  Nobody can know the true nature of their lover, especially when they're intentionally hiding it from you.  I'm sure he seemed like a decent guy when she first lay with him.  After that, every decision under her control she made was right.  She decided to have her children instead of kill them in an abortion.  Then she was the most loving mother imaginable to them.  In addition, she was a beautiful and successful idol that anyone can admire, beloved by millions of fans.  (For good reason, her performances are spectacular).  And even when a crazed fan gave her a fatal knife injury, she was so compassionate as to remember his face from various fan meetings and apologize for not being good enough for him.  Then even as she was dying she didn't bewail her own fate but tried as best she could to direct Aqua and Ruby towards a bright future, putting her children above herself to the very end.  That is a life and death of honor.

Apparently Andrew Anglin isn't dead but on hiatus due to 'burnout.'  I guess it was bound to happen eventually, as he's been posting virtually every day for decades, but it wouldn't have killed him to warn his readers in advance he was taking a vacation.  Furthermore, after all the times he said he'd keep writing no matter what this amounts to a broken promise.  Well, I guess honoring all your promises is difficult, but still, to not even give an explanation when you're constantly complaining about having a brain tumor, that's really misleading and rude.

I only post new posts when there's something new to talk about, so I can take long breaks, but I don't ask for donations or make promises I can't keep.  If I ever did decide to quit blogging I would say so and not just leave people hanging.  But I guess the biggest breach of honor is to continuously ask people to fund your 'war chest' in order to change the politics of the nation and then quit.  That's basically theft.  That wasn't charity, that was campaign finance, and when you promise to spend the money on a political campaign you can't then turn around and spend it on your pet cat.

It would have been better for Andrew Anglin if he'd stopped posting due to illness or death, instead of dishonor.  He should take a few lessons from Ai.

X-men '97 is okay:

I loved the old X-men the Animated Series, so I had high hopes for X-men '97.  The art style is better than ever, and the voice acting is solid, but the actual plot isn't that good.  There's a lot of soap opera type drama of people getting together and breaking up, which is totally uninteresting because it isn't love, none of it is permanent, so it's just sordid sluttery.

On top of that is a lot of violence, but it always occurs so randomly and suddenly.  Sentinels keep appearing out of nowhere and attacking everywhere.  You beat one mastermind behind the Sentinels and it always turns out there's another, with another batch of sentinels.  The plot keeps bouncing around.  Basically the only way to enjoy this series is to give up on following the plot and enjoy the cool fireworks.

Meanwhile, Kimetsu no Yaiba has finally joined the spring anime lineup.  The first episode (really two episodes) was low key, as expected when you're at the start of a new arc.  The real question is how long do they intend this season to be, and whether it's going to be full of filler or not.  We still don't know the answer to those questions.  They're keeping their cards to their chests.  But at least we've finally reached the beginning of the full spring lineup.  From here on we can turn our focus to the upcoming summer season, and boy is it going to be good.

Russia has begun its long awaited buffer zone operation, and they've taken a lot of empty territory and evacuated villages.  So far it hasn't stopped Ukraine's indiscriminate shelling of Belgorod, which killed 15 more civilians when they took down an apartment building with a long range missile.  I'm sure Ukraine is very proud of itself.  But maybe eventually it will achieve something.  Just like I continue to hope Russia will drive Ukraine so far from Donetsk it can't be shelled anymore.  This still hasn't happened because just the other day Ukraine blew up a cafe killing three civilians.  Basically now we have two glacial offensives instead of one.  Wake me up when they take Kharkov.

Daily Stormer hasn't updated in a while, so it's reasonable to expect Andrew Anglin is incapacitated due to illness or dead, given that he's been struggling with brain problems all year.  He hasn't really been saying anything new for a long time, but his concise and humorous delivery of the opponents' way of thinking, his biting satirical take on their positions, was always fun.  He never led a healthy lifestyle, though, so this is the fruit of his own decision making.  Whether it was smoking, vaping or drinking he was always chemically altering his brain somehow or other.  I'm content to experience the real world with my real brain, which results in me living a lot longer than him.  I have a great plan for the world -- how about everyone experience the real world with their real brains, and we just make the world a nice enough place to live in that no one feels the need to escape it?  We could double human lifespans overnight.

Eiyuuden Chronicles is an unfinished game that ate my save:

So I was doing great, high level, good gear, I had recruited all the recruitable heroes except for Reid, who you can't really get until later in the game when more high level beigoma are available.  I had built out most of my town.  I had beaten the hardest mock battles.  I had done everything right, except I hadn't accounted for bugs.

So I innocently followed the plot guidelines when it said, "Nowa can't seem to sleep, try taking a walk."  I met Seign on the rooftop with the pretty moon overhead and we had a conversation.  I figured, okay, the cutscene has happened, now surely Nowa will go to sleep, so I went back to the bed in my room and tried to sleep.  When that didn't work I went to the inn and slept.  But I had already triggered the bug.  Apparently Nowa was supposed to talk to a lot of people, not just Seign, before sleeping in his room.  If you go to his room at any time during this event the game breaks and it's impossible to advance the plot.  You can walk for as many eons as you want, you're never proceeding.  And of course as is traditional I always save at the inn, so I can't undo my decision to enter my room either.  The save is lost.  All my work on the game is lost.

Supposedly, maybe, the game makers are aware of this issue and will release a patch to address it.  But is it that easy?  Can they really turn back time and let me continue having nighttime conversations with people other than Seign?  Since they're such shitty coders they didn't notice this problem in the first place, I highly doubt their ability to fix it now that I've already saved past the point of no return.

I don't understand how game testers didn't notice this bug immediately.  It's the perfectly rational thing to do to go back to your room to try to sleep when it specifically tells you you're trying to sleep.  And yet apparently none of the beta testers ever thought to do this?  And now I'm punished for doing the reasonable thing, which, apparently, no one else in the entire company thought someone might do?

This event occurs before the last chapter of the game.  I had already practically won.  Actually, I was so powerful I was curb stomping the bosses I'd been fighting recently.  I deserved to win this game.  The coders stole that away from me.  In the most despicable and underhanded fashion.  They sold me a game that doesn't actually work and should not be on sale.  An unfinished game.  Honestly I should be allowed to sue them for a million dollars or something, but of course somewhere in some small text I'm sure they said they're not responsible for any bugs and it's my fault for trusting them.

So unless a patch comes out, that's the end of that game.  This game most definitely won't enter my hall of fame.  Far from being a 'must play' game, it's a 'must boycott' game for betraying its customers and ripping them off.  Apparently this wasn't the only game-breaking bug in the game, and they've already done patches fixing other disastrous bugs.  The whole game was shit from top to bottom and they still sold it as a finished product.

At least Shogun was as good a tv series as advertised.  It fulfilled my expectations and merits its place in my tv hall of fame.

Unnamed Memory, on the other hand, suddenly turned the male protagonist into a rapist, who to make matters worse halfway through his rape stopped and said it was just a prank to put a little scare into her.  So he's a cowardly half-assed rapist too.  There's no excusing his conduct, no imaginable argument could be made for how this is somehow okay, so the series is dropped.  I've never seen something so outrageous as a show trying to make us follow the exploits of a rapist hero who likes to 'put a scare into' his love interest.

Actually I'm reading a similar story, called Imouto Death Game, where the story revolves around a spree killer and his imouto, who is trying to prevent him in a redo of the previous time-cycle from doing his crimes again.  This man also does nefarious deeds while still being a main character and I like the manga, but there's still a big difference.  No one thinks what this guy is planning to do is forgivable.  But in Unnamed Memory, the guy half-rapes a girl and no one blinks, no one calls him on it, and the lady involved thinks nothing of it and treats him like normal seconds later.  In Imouto Death Game the whole story revolves around how sinister and scary the older brother is.  It attaches gravity to his crimes.  There's a world of difference.

Hero Academy has resumed so the number of good series to follow hasn't changed.  And Kimetsu will resume in a few days, so the spring season is actually getting better not worse.  With Hero Academy, Kimetsu, Wonderful Precure, Hibike! Euphonium and Girls Band Cry it's still a great season, regardless of how many shows I've dropped so far or will drop in the future.

Someya Mako's Mahjong Cooking manga has finished.  It had great art and sweet friendly vibes from beginning to end.  This is why Saki is such a great manga.  All the spinoffs are great and the main series is great too.

I've finished listening to 'Raise,' the ending theme of the ending of Wano arc, 100 times.  My initial impression that it was a 5-star song hasn't changed, so I was right to immediately promote it ahead of time.  As for the Girls Band Cry songs, 'Void,' and 'Wrong World,' they're 1 or 2-star songs, and only those two are worth listening to 100 times.  Eiyuuden Chronicles has more musical potential, and since I can't play the game anymore, it would make sense to move on to the postgame music ritual like I did for Granblue and Unicorn.

Girls Band Cry is a great anime:

It's difficult to call this an anime since it's full cg, but it's done in the anime style so good enough.  I've loved Girls Band Cry from the very first episode.  The speed and power of dialogue in this series is peerless.  So much of such import is said every single episode.  The characters are absolutely full of emotions and ideas and they express them immediately and forcefully.  There's nothing like it in any previous anime.  They have turned a simple concept, the formation of a new music band, into this incredible, insightful soul-search of the entire canvas of the psyche.  And these complicated, troubled people are so relatable that you cheer for them not because they're perfect but because they're imperfect.

But they aren't imperfect in the stupid ways Americans like to 'complicate' their characters, by making them pigs who fall for any stupid vice like alcohol or gambling or sex or whatever.  They're imperfect in that they can't control their runaway stampede of emotions and end up saying things they don't mean or didn't want to reveal, and then have to pick up the pieces afterwards.  Real, human imperfections.  Things admirable and sensible people have to fight with.  Not subhuman beasts, the imperfections of divine vessels with souls.

The perfect avatar of the entire spirit of Girls Band Cry is Nina, the lead vocalist.  Bullied in school, she gave up and dropped out, but she isn't so much sad about it as mad, so very mad.  And that anger is channeled into her beautiful voice and brilliant melodies, creating a completely unique musical tone.  I love the music of this anime so much I downloaded a whole cd of its music and am now screening it for my music hall of fame.  This is a musical anime and it delivers on the music side, on its promise that these girls are a band worth checking out.  Of course Nina has also been elevated to my fictional character hall of fame.

To make room in my top anime rankings I dropped Joukamachi no Dandelion.  Joukamachi's anime only loosely follows the original manga source, and ultimately for that reason I couldn't forgive it.  The anime is certainly gorgeous but it isn't true.  The truth is the manga, so really all we need is the manga.  There's no point honoring a lie.  If there's one thing that Girls Band Cry stands for it's truth.  They always tell the truth, straight from the heart, no matter how much it hurts.  And it's an original work so it's impossible to not adapt honestly.  For now Girls Band Cry will stick around at #200 in my rankings, but I'll eventually give it its true ranking, for instance once the whole series has aired.

Meanwhile, I also added Mayu from Wonderful Precure to my fictional character hall of fame.  Over the course of many episodes she's been wonderfully characterized as a sensitive soul that is overflowing equally with anxiety and compassion.  She's weak, but she sympathizes with the weak, and ultimately that makes her strong, because that sympathy always leads to her reaching out her hand to help.  It helps that she's also beautiful with a great voice.  And of course that she can transform into a powerful hero who saves the world.  Factors like that always make a character more likable/admirable.

Russia has taken some more villages in Ukraine, but at the same time they've also lost some villages -- Krinky and Nevelske.  It's hard to call that progress.  If Russia really does launch a major offensive like everyone says they will I hope it bags something more impressive than the petty progress we've been watching.  If they took Kharkov, for instance, that would make it very clear who's winning the war.  Not this back and forth nonsense.

Eiyuuden Chronicles has been good so far, but nothing special.  It's certainly a game worth playing, but 'must play' is a higher standard.  Once I've actually beaten it I can give a better judgment on that question.  It's fun collecting all the characters and building out your castle town.  The music is pretty good.  The plot is pretty simplistic but nothing objectionable.  The combat is turn-based but awkward because you have to make all your decisions for all your characters at once, so they generally are out of date and bad decisions by the time their turn comes along.  It's a rather dumb system that ruins the main appeal of having full control over your party.  I dislike how there's basically no way to protect your back rank fighters, which means low defense is a critical flaw in a playable character.  It makes you want to field six heavy knights as your party just to stop dying.  I guess the best part of Eiyuuden is it looks to be a long game which will occupy me for a long time.

Onigashima Paced:

At the rate One Pace was taking to adapt the Wano arc, they would finish releasing in ten years.  Obviously no one has time for their shenanigans (their perfectionism?), so an intrepid individual decided to edit the entire Onigashima arc to One Pace standards on his own.  This huge segment of One Piece is now available for viewing in a viewable format -- i.e., 45% shorter than the original One Piece broadcast, while still keeping every canon part of the manga intact.  This is exactly what we desire from One Pace, but it's actually out, unlike One Pace which who knows if they'll ever release this segment of the story.

There's still a gap between this release and One Pace's Wano arc releases, which means we still don't have a complete cut-to-manga version of the Wano arc, but now we're very close to that dream.  The editing could have cut more.  There were still a bunch of unnecessary flashbacks I had to skip through, some flashing back to just the previous episode.  Ridiculous.  As if we need a reminder of what happened twenty minutes ago.  But it was, in the main, a fine job.  Onigashima Paced was the equivalent of a sudden release of 57 great episodes of the #2 anime ever made.  It was like Christmas had come early.  I downloaded this present and marathoned it as quickly as possible, and now I'm all caught up.

Onigashima arc is a solid arc of One Piece.  Not as good as Dressrosa or Water 7, but better than the likes of Punk Hazard or Thriller Bark.  These 57 episodes made me laugh, they made me cry, and they made my heartbeat elevate as spectacular fight scenes played out on the most epic scale in One Piece history.  I'm not talking about the Gear 5th fight, but the 5 on 2 fight between the aspiring captains and the Yonkou.  That fight was so amazing in terms of all the synergistic interactions between all the different skills of the various participants.  Also Ulti was great.  Onigashima is the first arc with the whole crew together in one place for a long time, and the author made sure to give every member of the Straw Hats a moment to shine, which I appreciated.  It was like finally getting to see a bunch of old friends.  They'd been missing from the story for so long.  Most of One Piece these days is flash backs of unrelated characters, there's practically nothing about the original crew, so this was an oasis in the desert.

In honor of this massive deployment of new great anime, I also decided to add the ending theme song, Raise, to my music hall of fame as a 5-star song.  I don't have to demote anybody else to make room because I'm done with that.  But I can at least delete a 1-star song I don't want anymore, 'enemy spy,' so the total remains at 5500.

In addition, I'm adding three new characters to my fictional character hall of fame, all obviously from One Piece -- Tama, Marco and Law.  They all earned their new esteemed status during this arc.  They went above and beyond the call of duty to help out and save others and defeat enemies they really had no reason to expect they could.  They were heroes.

On this day I have nothing but praise for my 2nd favorite anime, it was a great day, a great moment.  57 episodes.  Episodes it was doubtful we'd ever get to see at the rate One Pace was going.  Few gifts are as precious as this one.

Irotoridori no Sekai read:

I finished the Kyou route, which unlocked the Shinku route, and then finished the Shinku route, which finished the entire visual novel.  Kyou is another failure of a human with low IQ who only has looks going for her.  But it was all worth it because I finally got to be with Shinku next.

The Shinku route was everything I had hoped it would be.  All the mysteries of the world were explained, the extremely strange setting and plot was made understandable, and the only girl I wanted to be with became the girl I spent the most meaningful and real time with.  Thanks to the Shinku route this visual novel did make my hall of fame, albeit in last place at #25.  This also justifies Shinku's presence in '100 Waifus,' as the last second inclusion made for the 42nd edition.  She really is that beautiful and wonderful a girl, and I don't mind her being memorialized forever.  Unlike the other girls in the story, she's extremely smart and capable, looking after others instead of needing to be looked after.

Kana and Mio had good routes, the visual novel wasn't horrible until the very end, but Tsukasa and Kyou were horrible.  Plus Suzu was annoying from start to finish, thank God she didn't have a route.  And Ayumu was completely pointless as a character, but oh well, they didn't waste much time on him so I guess it doesn't matter.  Mercifully, Tsukasa and Kyou had much shorter routes than Mio and Kana, so I guess even the authors knew they were bad routes.  I just wish I could have done Shinku's route sooner.

This is a must-read visual novel full of beauty and drama.  I only bought it by mistake but it was well worth the $30.  It's a shame it took 13 years for this visual novel to be translated from Japanese into English, and its sequel, which spends more time with Shinku and her imouto Ai, isn't translated at all (and probably will never be. . .sigh. . .)  Visual novels just are not supported sufficiently outside of Japan.  No matter how famous or great the game, whether it's Aiyoku or Da Capo, it's never fully translated, or it's only translated decades after the fact.  Irotoridori is just one more victim of that fate.

Supposedly Eiyuuden Chronicle will arrive in the mail tomorrow, so the timing is perfect.  I was able to clear out the slate of old projects before the new one began.  Actually I'm kind of thankful the delay gave me the time to rewatch Frieren and finish Irotoridori.  I'd been meaning to do these things for quite some time.

Now that I know Shinku belongs in '100 Waifus' and my edit wasn't a mistake, I could even re-read it for the 42nd time and prove nothing more needs to be edited or changed.  In which case I could finally put an official stamp on this project too.  Of course I can't be bothered to do that with Eiyuuden arriving so soon, but at least the option is now available.  It's good to be on track towards finally getting this lifetime work done.

Meanwhile, I dropped The New Gate and Lv2 Kara Cheat from my spring anime schedule because overpowered isekai protagonists bore me.  It's so annoying when they're strong enough to mold the world to their liking but instead let it trample over them and treat them like servants.  Grow a spine already.