Another Admiral Arrives:

The new event in Heaven Burns Red was underwhelming.  A short choose-your-own-adventure comical story of Yuki navigating a deadly contest with evil hackers.  But the rewards stemming from the new event were pretty impressive.  I recruited three brand new SS Memorias -- ghoul Miko, admiral Mion and special forces Chiroru.  The only SS Memoria I don't own in the entire game now is light Ichiko.  So close and yet so far.

I also got a bunch of other SS Memoria limit breaks.  As planned, I used 20 protean shards to upgrade hot springs Isuzu and wedding dress Ichiko to level 3.  Ghoul Miko and Admiral Mion both reached level 1 limit break quickly after I first acquired them.  Tuxedo Ruka reached level 3 limit break.  Base Satomi reached level 1.  After that it was a bunch of 2.5's or 3.5's.  I now have 21 SS Memorias stuck at halfway to their next limit break, a new record of wastefulness.

Admiral Mion's new ability is pretty impressive.  It gives the whole party up to crit, crit damage, tactical vision and skill attack for the next 5 turns, so the buff continues providing for everyone as they slam the enemy turn after turn.  Those are the best sorts of buffs, and seemingly this buffs everything.  The only thing it doesn't do is provide SP regen, something diva Ruka, unison Karen, imp Yayoi and other truly powerful characters do.  It's tough to say whether Admiral Aoi or Admiral Mion is better, but that's good company to share.  Unfortunately I don't know where I'd put Admiral Mion since all my squads are full of powerful warriors as is.  I'm sure there's something useful she could do if I concentrated on it, but I don't like Mion much so my bias is towards ignoring her.

The new score challenge was a lightning foe, so my thunder squad moved in and got a respectable 1.24 million point.  That wasn't enough to get all the loot from the event, though, so my critical penetration squad had to do it for them with a 1.4 million point performance.  The new seraph challenge was light based, but I ignored that and used my critical penetration squad to instantly get all the rewards there too, scoring 96k points.  All enemies, of all element types or none, are weak to critical penetration.  It's the solution to everything.  Apophis Final Form dies in 5 turns to my critical penetration squad, and I just ignore its attack mechanic which you're supposed to stun to stop because I'm too strong to care.

I got Seira to 5 reversions, giving her a new skill slot, which she sorely needed.  I also got Mari and Inori's master skills, two level 4 warriors I rely on greatly and thus should be as supported as possible.

Most of my time isn't going to Heaven, which has infrequent updates, but to Xenoblade Chronicles X.  I already love Lin, and exploring the vast world is really fun.  It's so time consuming to wander around searching for probes to place that I haven't actually advanced the plot much.  I'm too busy having fun messing around to play the game correctly. >.<.

Xenoblade X will take forever to complete, and the World Cup is coming soon.  But after Xenoblade X and the World Cup I still have six more games to beat waiting on my bookshelf.  There's no end to fruitful things to do, at least this year.  And Tenpure's release has been rescheduled to this June, so video games are going to have some stiff competition soon enough.

I'm not surprised by Ukraine targeting a college dormitory and slaughtering 21 girls and boys (mostly beautiful young college girls), and injuring 60 more, in a massive drone strike with multiple waves (which means the target was intentional).  They slaughtered a group of innocent revelers in Kherson (a region Ukraine claims is Ukrainian that they're trying to 'liberate') on New Year's Day to ring in 2026.  They've been doing this sort of satanic evil since 2014, when their president bragged to his own news channel on a video available to the whole world on YouTube that he was shelling kindergartners in the Donbass.  These 21 dead join the 8,000 civilians killed by Ukraine since the war began, and the 14,000 Ukraine killed by refusing to allow Donbass to secede in the period of 2014-2022.  I'm also not surprised that Ukraine denies it did the attack and even denies any of the murdered people died.  It denies everything.  The footage of the dead found in the rubble moments after the attack, the relatives attesting to their deaths, the videos of the dying as they're dying posted to social network sites, no proof is enough.  Ukraine denies it all in a brazen and dismissive manner.  They are so smug in their knowledge that the West will never call them on anything they do, like how Israel smugly tortures, rapes and murders Gazans for fun, that they don't even bother coming up with a cover story for what they did.

I'm also not surprised that there's total silence coming from all Western governments and human rights organizations.  After America slaughtered those hundreds of schoolgirls in Iran and never even apologized for it as a mistake we've already revealed exactly the sort of people we are.

Every day I pray for the downfall of the Satanic West which embraces not only LGBTQI+ stuff, but also this continuous slaughter of innocent children.  It's obvious the Covid virus was designed in a US lab and unleashed upon the world, killing tens of millions.  And the Covid vaccines only made things worse.  So perhaps the outright slaughter of children with explosives shouldn't be treated as a big deal.  But there's always plausible deniability with these other crimes.  A murky 'well we don't really know what happened,' which our governments hide behind.  This drone strike on Starobelsk, we know exactly what happened, which makes it all the more infuriating that we refuse to condemn it.

Yet again the people of Starobelsk, located in Luhansk oblast, are the very same 'Ukrainians' that Ukraine is claiming it is trying to 'liberate' from the evil Russian occupiers.  Ukraine is fighting to 'save' the college girls they're intentionally murdering with multiple waves of drone attacks.  And the West is spending hundreds of billions of dollars and risking nuclear war, the end of all human civilization, to aid in this noble goal of Ukraine's.  But are we really so sure Ukraine has good intentions towards Luhansk if they're hunting down and killing their college-age girls for fun, with absolutely no military purpose?  Is Ukraine's narrative really that believable after this?  Will no one learn from this object lesson of Ukrainian intentions and priorities?

Xanth volume #49, Knicklepede Knight, read:

It didn't take long to read Xanth's latest volume, I finished it a day after the book's release.  There was nothing particularly offensive about it, but it followed the same ruts the series has been in for a long time.  A group of nonentities, this time bugs, get caught up with all-powerful Demons and their contests, and end up saving the mortal universe (this time multiverse) yet again from nefarious Demon threats.  This has happened for like ten books in a row.  It's getting a little old.  Sort of like the author, who is also an elderly 91.  But he still intends to write a Xanth volume #50.  There's no stopping this old man and his old, repetitive tales.

My biggest complaint with the book is it threw out all the established lore about zombies in the past Xanth book and imported a new zombie menace that has nothing to do with the past zombies which were a feature of Xanth's history from a foreign universe.  If you're going to make the book about zombies, it should be about the zombies from Castle Zombie, and the Zombie Master, and all that preestablished lore.  You can't just write about new zombies and ignore the old ones.  It creates a discontinuity in the setting.  But oh well, the book was still better than the feminist nonsense of the past few volumes.

The bizarre take on gays continues in this volume, as Santo is still the main character of the story, supposedly gay, but still dating Noe, a girl.  They spend all their time together yet again in this book.  It's like the author doesn't really understand what the word 'gay' means.

I've narrowed my Octopath Traveler 0 song collection down to 35 tunes.  I could reduce the number more before reaching my required 100-listen threshold to reach my music hall of fame.  Most of the eliminated songs were remixes, some were plain no good.  As for Wishvale, there are three songs that all have the same central melody, but represent the town at a different time in its turbulent history.  I don't consider any of the Wishvale songs to be 'remixes' of any of the others, they're all part of the same overall 'tale of Wishvale.'  Or 'Song of Wishvale,' if you prefer.  So I stitched all three songs together and titled the 'Song of Wishvale' as 'Wishvale, For the Future, Prosperous Days Ahead.'  Then I gave this 5-star song, the best song in the game, to Stia, as Octopath Traveler 0's first wonderful character.

The other songs still need to prove themselves, but Wishvale, the heart and soul of this game, doesn't need to prove itself any further.  Stia, the builder of Wishvale from the ground up, from '0', as it were, is the heart and soul of this game's characters.  It's perfectly connected.  She's also voiced by Haruka Tomatsu, the voice of Asuna Yuuki, so her attractiveness is top notch.

By a lucky free ticket, I got Monaca's first limit break ever.  Now all the seraphs in my army have at least one limit break.  That's got to be a relief to Monaca, who in the game is supposed to be the strongest, but in my collection was the weakest.

Octopath Traveler 0 Fully Beaten:

It's taken all month, but I've finally defeated Octopath Traveler 0.  I always assumed there would be some tough fight at some point, but there never was.  I was always overleveled, overgeared, and overpowered.  I completed every quest and every character conversation, defeating the secret true boss where you get to fight with your whole party of 40 at once.  All in all it took 142 hours.

The plot kind of meandered.  I never felt attached to the story outside of the times I was rebuilding my city, Wishvale, and re-gathering its refugee townsfolk from abroad.  That's the only thing I really cared about.  The rest was just smiting over-the-top villains who were evil for evil's sake.

The graphics were nice when it came to the environment, but pixel art characters look pathetic compared to the beautiful graphics of FF7 Rebirth.  I expect more from PS5 games.  The gameplay was fun until my party became too overpowered.  At that point all I did was the exact same strategy for every fight, which beat everything flawlessly.

In the end the best aspect of Octopath Traveler 0 is the same as the best aspect of 1 & 2 -- the music.  Yasunori Nishiki composed over a hundred new pieces of music for this game, on top of all the borrowed music from the past games.  Nishiki is a genius so getting to listen to 100 of his new compositions is a treasure.  He was already my 7th favorite composer before this.  Once I rate all these new songs for my music hall of fame, he will be rated higher than that.

While the actual gameplay lasted 142 hours, my enjoyment of this game's soundtrack will stretch out for years and decades into the future.  I do plan on adding some of the characters from this game to my wonderful hall of fame, but before then I need to decide which of Octopath Traveler 0's songs are the most important to represent, so I can assign the new characters the correct suitable tunes.

Meanwhile, I finished reading Index GT volume 15.  The remainder of the book was no more inspiring than the beginning, but at least I'm done with it now.  I wish people would instead translate Ryuuou no Oshigoto!  The final volume of that series comes out this July in Japan, marking another milestone event for 2026.  But it will pass us by like a ghost ship in the night for lack of an English translation.

With perfect timing, the new Xanth volume, Knicklepede Knight, has come out immediately after I finished Index GT 15.  So that's my next goal.

Realistically speaking, people only have 12 hours a day they can live during.  Eight hours goes to sleep, and four hours goes to maintenance activities like bathing, eating, cooking, shopping, grooming, toilet, etc.  Until you're 20 or so you're stuck doing busywork in school, so all that time is also unavailable for living.  Let's say you live a healthy life and last to age 80 with a still-intact body and mind that can enjoy life.  That's 60 years of lifespan, but only 30 years of usable time on Earth.  If you don't work at all, you get 30 years of entertainment to enjoy.  If you do work even a part-time job, you could easily half that amount of free time, giving you only 15 years to enjoy life.  And if you work full time, you could half that again.  Now you're looking at 7 years of entertainment in your entire life.  Not nearly enough time to enjoy all the offerings of my halls of fame.  Barely enough time to enjoy anything.

If a full time job is a required ticket to get a wife, that wife had better be damn amazing.  She's sapping away 2/3'rds of your life for the privilege of her company.  The kids you have had better be damn amazing to justify the time you spend working to afford them.  If they're anything short of perfect angels, you'll have sacrificed your precious lifespan for nothing.  Basically, every moment with your wife or child would need to be three times as good as the best entertainment available on Earth for the math to make sense.  It would have to be three times as fun to chat with your wife than watch Clannad.  I just find that hard to believe or imagine.  What kind of wife or child could be three times as enjoyable or emotionally moving as Clannad?  They'd have to be demigods or something to manage that.

The only way the math makes sense is if your work is as enjoyable as entertainment.  If you're working for fun then all those years lost to work aren't lost.  In that case you're back to 30 years of enjoyment in life -- 23 years of enjoying your work and 7 years of enjoying your family life that comes as a reward for being successful at work.  Which is why I say only 5% of people should pursue careers and degrees.  If you're one of the 5% who can land a dream job, like a celebrity or a rock star or something, the math works out in your favor as more enjoyable than just staying home and watching anime.  Anything else falls short.  Yes, realistically, it's possible to work hard and study hard, earn a middling wage and get a middling wife and middling kids as a result.  I can't bring myself to work hard at things I actively dislike, so it's a path I could never take.  But there are psychologies that can endure such things for the sake of the 'rewards' at the end of the rainbow.  The problem is, as laudable as their endurance is, by my math the rewards fall far short of what would be necessary for this deal to make sense.  It's not even close.  You're literally dying for nothing.  A wife who will most likely be fat, liberal, mentally ill, cheat on you, divorce you, and stop having sex with you (then again if she's fat that's a blessing.)  Kids who are born of that very wife and subject to that wife's influence.  You can't tell me that's worth two-thirds of your lifespan.  I don't buy it.  No one could buy that.

Imagine if a devil came down to you at age 20 and offered you a deal -- he would guarantee you an average wife and an average two children born from that wife, if you signed over 2/3'rds of your lifespan to him, and furthermore promised that for at least 2/3 of your life you'd make yourself miserable.  That's what working at a non-dream-job is like, so this is no exaggeration.  Who would take that deal?  The world has 8 billion people, it isn't necessary to have children at any cost.  The world will be full of people whether you sign your soul away to the devil or not.  This world doesn't need more children, it needs more quality children raised in a quality environment due to a quality loving relationship between the parents.  There's no way you can gift your children that from such a poisoned beginning.  From such a devil's deal.  Find a way to drop out of the workforce entirely.  Inherit wealth, or perhaps make a lot early in life and then retire as quickly as possible and start living off investment income.  Do whatever you can.  There's no perfect answer because money is still necessary for food and shelter and the like, but do whatever you can to maximize your true lifespan.  Your true lifespan is invaluable.  There are so many great uses of your free time.  Hundreds, thousands, almost more than can be named.  Don't let the vultures strip you of your free time and peck at you your whole life.  Freedom is free time.  Free time is freedom.  Don't give away your freedom for nothing.

Men are taking my advice:

For decades now, I've been pointing out that relationships with girls aren't worth it.  Girls have become loathsome liberals intent on child genital mutilation and other sick goals, with whom a single hour of company would be torture.  They also have a slew of mental disorders that makes life chaotic and unhappy around them.  They're no longer attractive, with 70% of American women either overweight or obese.  They won't have your children, with the fertility rate cratering every year to new record lows.  They're likely to cheat on you, separate from you, divorce you, or just go cold fish and never have sex with you despite supposedly being your wife, and now have the legal right to accuse you of rape and throw you in jail if you object to this.  If you are divorced, which can happen via 'no fault', one-sided decisions, you will lose your income, your assets like your home, and your children, all of which will go to the woman.  It's a completely one-sided agreement where she owes you nothing but you owe her for life.

There will always be a few blessed men who beat the odds, with perfect girlfriends and wives who none of these complaints apply to.  But what are the odds you'll be one of those men?

Slowly but surely, my call for a complete boycott on dating or marrying women or even seeking their approval, has been adopted by the public at large.  Over 1/3 of working-age men are no longer in the labor force.  Like me, they've all given up on impressing women (women won't date men who lack jobs, so dropping out of the labor force is equivalent to dropping out of the dating market), and are seeking happiness through things entirely under their own control.  We will never become dependent on someone as unreliable as the modern woman again for happiness or fulfilment.  We can find all that on our own, and no one can take it from us.  No one has any legal claim against us.  No one has any right to our property or our time.  We were born on this Earth free and we can remain free our entire lives by just not signing our souls over to women.

Even attempting to associate with women is rife with danger.  If you don't seek sex you can't be accused or convicted of sex crimes.  Does this sound like a remote danger?  Not really, a million men are convicted sex offenders in America.  Many more are accused and have to go through some legal process due to said accusations.  No doubt millions have been sued over this in civil court.  Multiple presidents have been successfully prosecuted for this, so it doesn't matter how 'high status' you are, or how unlikely it is you would need to stoop to crime to have sex with a woman.  Professional athletes are likewise accused of this all the time, a category of men you would imagine would never need to assault an unconsenting woman.

Kids all have dream jobs like artist, scientist or athlete.  Very few of them aspire towards anything outside this high-pay, high-prestige, high-fun field of activity.  If you can actually achieve a job like this, it makes sense to work hard and study hard and do whatever it takes to achieve your dream.  Your life will be rich and fulfilling even before a girl enters the picture -- but girls invariably will enter the picture, because they'll be attracted like bees to honey by your success.  Then you can cash in your dream job by also getting a dream companion, who won't be one of these Hillary-supporting, mentally ill, overweight, unreliable slobs.  But that pathway towards a good life is closed off to most men.  Regardless of what children dream, at best 5% of them will get a job like that, followed by an elite woman who's acceptable marriage material.

By all means, every boy should attempt to achieve some high status position in life by coining a rap song, trying out for their local sports team, writing their own book, entering a science fair competition, or whatever floats their boat.  If their initial attempts are met with explosive success well beyond the norm, then it makes sense to pursue that dream and put some real effort into concretizing that potential.  Very quickly there are signs that what you're doing isn't a futile waste of time but is really getting the world's attention.  If you don't see those signs then your rap song, book, sport or garage-room experiment, however intrinsically meretricious, isn't a gateway to a dream job and therefore should be abandoned (except as an enjoyable hobby.)

My advice to the remaining 95% is radically different from my advice to the lucky 5%.  For the 5%, work hard, study hard, follow all the rules and regulations, put your head down and let destiny take its course.  Wealth, fame, power and hot women await you.

For the remaining 95%, who can't leverage some special talent into material success in this world, either because they don't have any talent or the world refuses to recognize it, my advice is to not work hard, don't study hard, don't do what anyone tells you to do, drop out of society entirely.  Most of all don't waste your time pursuing women.  Any woman you could possibly get isn't worth getting.

The amount of money it takes to support yourself with basic amenities is less than $12,000 a year.  If you're really frugal it can be less than $6,000 a year.  This means you can work at any part-time job and easily make enough to pay your bills.  Say you work 20 hours a week at $10 an hour, something any waiter could manage -- that's already $10,400 right there.  Not to mention various subsidies you get from the government, like the earned income tax credit.  You don't have to bust your butt in school and go to college and take on a huge debt to get some useless degree and then work like hell to pay off your college debts and afford a home (which you won't need because you'll never marry or have kids anyway).  Relax and enjoy your life.  It's your life, you have almost all of your time to yourself, you can make of it whatever you will.

There's a plethora of entertainment that's freely available with nothing more than an internet subscription.  It's easy enough to go beyond that and buy all the video games you want, as each game lasts over 100 hours, giving you an expense-to-entertainment ratio of under $1 an hour.  If you really want to be a cheapskate, just go to an online game parlor and play other interested volunteers at chess, bridge or Go.  That could take up your entire life for free.  But you don't have to be that cheap.  Entertainment really isn't that expensive, go ahead and splurge on anything you like, and it will turn out that you still have more than enough to go around.  To fill up all the hours of your free time and more.

On this blog I've detailed hundreds of go-to entertainment resources that can last the interested partaker decades.  Video games are the largest time sink, but the most densely rewarding experiences are my top 200 anime, followed by my top 25 visual novels, my top 75 manga, my top 200 movies, my top 100 authors, and my top 10 tv shows.  Along the way, most of my favorite 5,500 songs can also be heard, as they're mainly embedded in the other works.  Not a single one of these entertainment options requires a girlfriend or wife.  In fact, many of them serve as perfect replacements for the role of 'girlfriend' or 'wife.'  Waifus are generally preferable over real women, and the romances with those waifus are more emotionally rewarding than the likely result of consorting with a real-life woman.

If, somehow, people manage to work their way through all my hall of fame entries, there's a large category of runner-ups that can deliver almost as much fun.  That list is ever-growing as the world continues to spin out wonderful stories one after the next.  Imagine if you started entertaining yourself with my list today and used the next 20 years to go through it all.  That means there would be 20 years of new art awaiting you, completely untouched, virgin unexplored fun, waiting for you to try.  If you spent the next 20 years consuming all that new art, 20 more years of new art will have appeared.  The potential pleasure is nigh limitless.

The real problem isn't the lack of fun alternatives to girls -- it's that life isn't long enough to get through all the fun alternatives to girls.

I think we can all agree that the best things in life are powerful emotional experiences that leave a positive impact on our memories that never fades.  There are very few girls who can deliver such experiences (and not betray and despoil them with their future behavior).  If you're one of the lucky few who can get girls to give you that rush, then go ahead and enjoy girls.  But for everyone else there's Mastercard -- no, that's a joke, please don't go into credit card debt.  For everyone else there's my entertainment halls of fame.  The number of powerful emotional experiences waiting in them, ready to make you laugh and cry and cheer and smile and reminisce, is legion.  Hundreds of such experiences.  Bristling, ready to go, happy to invade your brain.

By a fortuitous coincidence, at the same time women entered the workforce (the 1970's) and thus stopped attempting to become attractive to men, the personal computer was invented, which gave men the chance to construct their own reality from the bottom up.  Ever since then, the world of reality has become ever glummer for men, with their prospects at a wife or girlfriend dimming and dimming to an ever blacker shade of gray.  But the world of fantasy has simultaneously continuously brightened.  We've gone from Pac-Man and Pong to Final Fantasy and Chrono Trigger to Clannad, Sword Art Online and Kimetsu no Yaiba.  We've gone from the Atari to the Playstation 5, with a few pixels for Moon Patrol turning into the beautiful 3-D models of Tifa and Aerith hugging each of our arms as we navigate through the train graveyard.

Reality was really great for men in the past.  They all had access to thin, young, beautiful girls they could marry and have lots of kids with.  As recently as the 1950's this was the norm.  The normal man, even the below average man, could look forward to this reality.

But fantasy today is so much better than anything reality back then had on offer.  Now you can have as many beautiful wives as you want, as many intense romances as you want, all for free.  And on top of that you can enjoy everything else in life, that has nothing to do with romance.  Want to experience an intense war story?  Go watch Naruto or Bleach.  Want to experience an amazing sports rivalry?  Go watch Uma Musume or Hikaru no Go.  Want to laugh at life's absurdities?  Go watch Working! or Spy x Family.  Want to solve a mystery or try out life in a new world or save the world from villains or run a kingdom or power yourself up to God-like levels?  It's all available.  There's a story involving all of that and more.  You can experience a quality version of anything desirable you can imagine.  Fellow men, talented, creative, imaginative men, have come before us and laid down the tracks which our engine of experience need only travel down.  Since men are simple and all want the same things, everything you can enjoy has been imagined and created by some previous man already.  It's all ready to go, waiting for your brain to interface with.

And it's only a matter of time before virtual reality can create a realistic facsimile of what you can experience with a real girl, at which point girls will truly have become completely obsolete.  Obviously anything the brain can experience, can be simulated and copied.  The laws of physics implies there's some way to activate the exact same sensations in the brain as real girls can activate now.  It's just a matter of time before the code is cracked.

I used to complain a lot more about how bad girls in the modern world were and how poorly they treated men.  But I don't complain much anymore, because it no longer matters.  To me girls are irrelevant, and their behavior has no impact on my life.  I've replaced them.  And it turns out at least 1/3 of the entire population of men in America have done the same.  They're quickly catching on, like I have, that girls are no longer needed for anything.

Miniscule Progress:

I spent another $67 to secure a guaranteed limit break level 1 for unison Karen, as well as a limit break level 4 for base Minori.  As a side benefit I also got hot springs Niina to limit break level 2.  I also restocked on paid quartz whose benefits haven't come to fruition yet.  Unison Karen, as part of my top squad that's meant to beat all the toughest opponents, needed to be stronger than level 0.  The spending was a necessity, sadly.

My light squad did a fine job with the latest score challenge, scoring 1.3 million, about the same score as the critical penetration squad got against the same foe.  But perhaps most impressive right now is squad 31-E, with 5 of the 6 sextuplets now having max level limit breaks, and Niina at 2 out of 4, which isn't bad either.  My original 'top' squad was the sextuplets, from the very beginning of the game they've always outperformed.  It's nice to see them thriving again.  My current priority for protean shards is to give hot springs Isuzu and wedding dress Ichiko their level 3 limit breaks, at which point Squad 31-E will be top of the line.  As will Squad 8, which uses 3 of the sextuplets - base Minori, wedding dress Ichiko and hot springs Isuzu.

No other squad has 5 base SS Memorias at max.  No other squad even has 3 base SS Memorias at max.  Squad 31-E is way out in front.  Maxed out base Memorias are permanent benefits, because they give +10% stats to all memorias of that character, whichever one you use.  They never become obsolete like other memorias do, they're helpful no matter what.

Meanwhile, I beat the last ring questline in Octopath Traveler 0, only for a new enemy to emerge and steal 7 of the 8 rings, then escape into literal Hell.  That's quite the plot twist.  I also got the final sacred weapon and have quite the well equipped party.  I'm far higher level than the plot expects me to be right now, so all the fights are quite easy.  But who knows, maybe the game will last long enough that it will eventually become challenging again.

I rewatched Release that Witch, which is one of the necessary factors for it to make my great anime rankings.  Unfortunately there's still no news on a season 2, which is the other necessary factor.  I swear, these first 8 eps could compete with any first 8 eps of any other series.  If not for Release that Witch being cancelled far too early, it could have ranked so highly.  What a missed opportunity.

I added three new characters to my wonderful hall of fame -- Tetia, the cute and kind fellow apprentice mage in Witch Hat Atelier.  Her long pink hair is wonderful enough right there.  Dragon, Luffy's father in One Piece, who is the heroic leader of a heroic resistance army to a very evil World Government.  (It's only become clear recently how evil the Marines really are.  It's all the more impressive that Dragon was originally a Marine but grew disgusted with how evil they were and formed a resistance movement against it, instead of choosing to stay with the 'winning' side and profit from it.)  Lastly I added a hybrid character as one entry -- Qui-Gon/Darth Maul.  This is because both characters are mirrors of each other -- they both appear and then die in the same movie.  They're both awesome while they last, representing the 'light' and 'dark' side of the same Force.  And they literally fought each other to the death to the song 'Duel of the Fates,' so the song really belongs to both of them.  Two halves of the same whole, they're given Duel of the Fates as their shared theme song.

Obi-Wan now has 'Ben Kenobi's Death/TIE Fighter Attack' as his theme song, which is fitting enough.

Tetia has 'The Town with an Exotic Fragrance' which perfectly fits her cheerful, exciting life.  And Dragon got Omnis Lacrima, a song as epic as his role in One Piece.  1817 characters in all, and I don't think the new ones are any worse than the old.

I watched all the eps of One Piece's Egghead arc that One Pace hasn't covered yet, so I'm all up to date on One Piece.

Kuroha, who wrote the Kitakubu manga, has a new manga out, called Satanica.  It's been good so far, though not as good as Kitakubu.

I've read the first three chapters of Index GT volume 15.  The remaining portions haven't been translated yet, but they should be available soon.  I don't like this new 'heel turn' by Hamazura, so the book has only been mediocre.  Currently Index and Xanth are competing to see who will waste more of my time by never ending, but after coming this far there's no way I'll drop either of them.

The next Xanth book should be out in a few days, so after Index comes Xanth again.

Small Progress:

No new event came out in Heaven Burns Red today, but there were a lot of paid quartz offers I took advantage of, seeing as how I'd accumulated a vast pile of paid quartz in the past.  This netted me a lot of useful limit breaks, like funeral Tsukasa going up to level 2, wedding dress Ichiko to 2.5, vendor Chiroru to 2.5, raccoon Kanata to level 1, light Yuina to 3.5, base Minori to 3.5, etc.  The best acquisition was a brand new suit Bon Ivar.  Unfortunately a new Ichiko SS Memoria has come out, so the total number of missing SS Memorias from my collection stays the same.

I climbed the new floors of the clock tower and got Risa and Tama's skill evolutions.  I also got the new high score rewards available there.

I got Risa's reversions up to 5 like my other elite characters.

I beat the new score challenge with a high score of 1.3 million, enough to claim all the loot available there, like usual with my critical penetration squad.

I've also made progress in Octopath Traveler 0.  I've beaten 7 out of the 8 ring questlines.  I've gotten most of the battle tested, forbidden and sacred weapons.  I've fully built out my city of Wishvale.  The best part of this new Octopath game is that it plays a lot like Heaven Burns Red, with a frontline set of characters and a backline that can be exchanged freely.  The backline units can't act or take damage, but they do acquire resources while in the back.  Then when the frontline is exhausted you can take up the slack with the backline and let the frontliners rest and recuperate in a place of safety.  It's the coolest system ever for turn-based combat with large parties.  I thought Heaven Burns Red, which lets you play with 6 characters like this, was a great improvement over the typical 3-man parties of Final Fantasy.  But Octopath one-ups that and lets you play with 8 characters at once.  The versatility of choosing any ability you want between eight different characters is unmatched in any turn-based game ever.

Driselle and Waya:

Driselle is a minor character but a consequential one.  She matters to both Rowen and Elize by giving both of them a new home and family.  She's pretty, kind and brave.  That's good enough for me, especially when the perfect song is waiting for her, 'A Merchant Town Full of Life.'  This fits as her theme song because she's the leader of the city that the song is literally about.  Hubert got a Tales of Graces song, 'Dance of the Unified Water,' because he's a Tales of Graces character.  Itsuki from Haruhi Suzumiya, who used to have Dance, was given Unused Track 05 from Air instead.

Waya is the handsome young Go player in Hikaru no Go who feels like what ordinarily would be the protagonist of the series.  He's friendly and well-liked and good looking and competent at his job.  I gave him the theme song 'The Second Element II' because he got second in the pro exam.

I test drove unison Karen in my critical penetration squad against the latest score challenge and for the first time ever got over 1.8 million.  The highest squad 31-A has ever  scored is 1.75 million.  This is objective proof that unison Karen is the real deal.  This is at level 0 limit break -- everyone in Squad 31-A is at max limit break level 4.  The reward for reaching 1.8 million was a bunch of title badge experience which got Karen, Risa, Inori and Jamie to title badge level 10, unlocking new skill slots for those four.  This one score challenge created more title badge 10 holders than everything I'd done before.

I've finished the original arc of Octopath Traveler 0, avenging the destroyers of my city.  It's a great game.  What impresses me most is how they reuse assets from the first two games, the layouts of all the cities, the music, etc., while still producing an original game with an original plot.  Maybe more games should use this model, in order to lower production costs while still producing an entertaining product.