No Game No Life volume 8 Read:

This book sucked as much as the previous one.  I had hoped that it, having the answers to the questions posed in book 7, would be satisfactory, but since the answers just seem to spring out of nowhere, or just be half-assed and unsatisfactory themselves, they don't provide any additional value to the composition.

There is simply no way someone could derive from the wording of the rules the answer to the puzzle.  It requires all sorts of sleights of hand and redefinitions of terms no one would ever think of.  It's basically just nonsense.

And whenever the story bothers to ask a deep question it just dodges the question by laughing at it like the Joker and responding with, "why so serious?"  Why is Sora now the Joker?  Is the answer to everything nihilism?  Or lewd hedonism?  Is that what I'm supposed to 'learn' from this book?

I don't feel any connection to these characters anymore.  I used to like them, but I don't anymore.  This is because they seem to be a bunch of callous assholes.  I thought before that Sora and Shiro were trying to introduce a mutually beneficial world order of peace and prosperity, as evidenced by their saving the Dhampir, Siren and Flugel species from extinction, but as far as I can tell now they just like to go around insulting people and taking upskirt photos.  There is no greater objective.  They themselves have renounced a belief in anything greater than momentary pleasure.  No Game No Life Zero was infinitely better than the current story.

I don't see the point of reading this series any further.  Both volumes 7 and 8 sucked, and it will probably just go downhill from here.  Books 4-5 were good but that's ages ago now.  This author had one good idea -- the transition of a world at war to a world of games -- and that idea has already been thoroughly covered.  All subsequent ideas he's written in this series have been awful.  And with the number of Ixceed races remaining, God knows how long he could drag this series out.  It could still be going a decade from now.

Meanwhile, I discovered Short Fanfare 05 is a remix, the same tune as Mission Complete, which itself is just an excerpt from Prologue Movie.  That brings my music hall of fame down to 5411.

I finished rewatching Ojamajo Doremi.  In retrospect, the first season was the best.  But there were just too many nonsense episodes about unimportant people and dumb things to ever respect this series again.  It's bizarre that they've chosen to revive this franchise with a new movie -- at the end of the last season everyone renounced being a witch and renounced being friends, completely obliterating everything.  How on Earth can you write a sequel to that?

But I did rank Ojamajo Doremi for a long time in my rankings -- once as highly as 2nd best ever -- so I felt a residual duty to rewatch in full the show I'd been hyping to others for so long.  That duty is now put to rest.  I'll watch the new short series coming out now and the movie, but I won't rank it anymore, and I don't consider it must-see for anyone else.

Like usual the only story I can trust to be entertaining is my own.  It makes me want to write more 'In Another World With 100 Waifus' just to get away from all the let-downs everyone else is making.  Even after reading my new expansion pack 3 times, it never gets tiresome.  That's how good storytelling should make me feel.