flowers and eternal heat:

The first two new songs to enter my music hall of fame for 2024 are 'flowers' and 'eternal heat.'  Both songs actually came out in previous years but I acknowledged them now.  Flowers is the song for the Fate/Grand Order memorial music video, and it's a doozie.  I promoted it all the way to 5-star.  It sounds a lot like Suzume's theme song which is also 5-star.

Eternal Heat is my favorite song from Star Ocean the Divine Force.  It's a sort of religious chant that plays in the background of a particular zone in the game, with a full vocal chorus.  So I guess a Shinto chant instead of a Gregorian chant.  I left it at 1-star.

To make room I kicked out 'Shiver' from Valkyrie Profile and stitched together two FF4 cantrips, 'Fanfare 1' and 'Inn.'  Even stitched together the new song is only 10 seconds long, so clearly the previous songs didn't deserve to be 1-star songs each individually.  Basically nothing of value was lost.  I also demoted a song from each other tier to keep everything balanced at 1100 songs a tier.

Afterwards I stitched 'The Paladin' onto the other two FF4 cantrips, making it a reasonable 30 second long song.  This gave me room for another 1-star song to exist, 'Lost Shine,' the ending to the first episode of Uma Musume S3, sung by the lovable Kitasan Black.

All the details can be found as always in my music permapost.

Michigan dominated Washington from beginning to end.  The score was close for a long time but you could really feel Michigan had no chance of losing.  Congratulations to Michigan on a perfect season, the only undefeated team in the FBS, which makes them the undisputed #1.  I still think teams that steal signs shouldn't really be awarded National Championships but oh well.

I finished my rewatch of Dragon Ball Kai Recut's Buu arc.  It did a good job shortening every scene.  Vegeto's fight with Buu was much shorter.  Retrieving the absorbed bodies from inside Buu was much shorter and made Goku and Vegeta's decision to enter Buu when they had won if they had just stayed outside much more sensible (because things went smoother in the real version of events.)  After that, gathering energy for the Spirit Bomb thankfully took less time, as did the Buu vs. Buu fight.  Everything took less time.  It's such a better version of the series, I'm sad that it took this late in my life to watch the real Dragon Ball.  I watched the crappy version so many times before this.  Dragon Ball's elevated rank of #6 is deserved after watching this and with Daima and likely a new season of Super coming.  Recut shrank the series down to a reasonable length, but Dragon Ball excitingly is about to get enormous again.

Dragon Ball Super's manga needs to admit events have caught up with the ending of Z though.  In Z Pan is 4 years old, and in the latest Super Hero movie Pan was at least 3, she was talking, flying, fighting, a seemingly completely mature adult.  There's no more room for anything to happen before Pan trains for the Tenkaichi tournament.  Super should segue into the ending of Z with its next manga chapter.  If it wants more adventures from there, it should be after Goku is training with Oob.

I also finished my rewatch of Goblin Slayer S2.  It was great as expected, justifying its new entry into my rankings.  I like that it focused more on the females of the party since Goblin Slayer has already had everything interesting about him thoroughly described.

I'm very happy my Houston Texans and Dallas Cowboys made the Playoffs.  Now they just need to meet in the Super Bowl so I can't lose no matter who wins.