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Wednesday, June 12, 2024

Broken Blade manga fully translated:

Two years after the manga's completion in Japan, we get to read the conclusion in English.  This final chapter does a good enough job at concluding the Assam arc, but it does nothing to address the overall conflict between Athens and Krisna.  The author clearly lost interest in the series and shut it down prematurely.  That or the audience abandoned the author and it was no longer financially possible to continue.  Either way it's a huge disappointment, especially since the last chapter was quite good.  In fact the whole Assam arc was quite good.  The art and action were captivating.  Oh well.  All things must pass.

I live for endings, but I'm not sure you can really classify this as an ending.  More like an abandoned artwork.  On the bright side, many great series are getting real endings -- My Hero Academia (though strangely it's now gone on hiatus right before it ends), Edens Zero, and now Oshi no Ko and Akatsuki no Yona have declared they're on their final arcs.  These are all major stories so getting their endings one after the next is pretty earthshaking.

Of course, Akatsuki no Yona is a monthly series, so it could run for years before finishing even with it being 'nearly over.'  Saki is similar, a monthly series with lots of hiatuses, so even though it's in the last round of the finals of the tournament, there's no telling how long the manga will continue.

One of my favorite edits for '100 Waifus' this time around was in Chapter 58, where I cut out a witty reply and instead gave an honest and heartfelt one to Rin Nohara's question.  The witticism was in direct contradiction to an earlier statement made to Kokona in Chapter 15, so amounted to a plot hole that had to go.  But I was able to keep intact the overall thrust of the conversation so the edits didn't spiral out of control.  It was another one of those 'plot hole saving sentences' where you have to somehow turn everything around in ten words or less.  I hate plot holes so I try to fill them in wherever I find them, but I also can't chuck away the years of effort that were built atop those plot holes, so it's all about the art of the possible.

Hunter Biden was obviously guilty of illegal gun possession, the evidence against him was infinite, so I'm not sure what the jury could have done other than convict him.  This doesn't somehow 'make up' for Trump's conviction on a completely phony case based on a non-crime.  For one thing nobody cares about Hunter Biden, the equivalent would be Joe Biden getting convicted for child molestation.  That would be a tit for tat.  Or Hillary for mass murder.  I'm only interested in justice that takes down powerful Democrats equal to powerful Republicans.  If 'nobody' is above the law, I want that to extend to powerful Democrats, not their sons.  Talk to me once you've put Joe on trial.

Rin from Yes Precure 5 is kind of a jerk so I took her out of my Wonderful Fictional Characters permapost.  She still belongs in '100 Waifus' as Nozomi's best friend but that's as far as I'll honor her.

I'm glad the Starship is making progress and not blowing up in midair.  But a permanent colony on Mars which isn't beholden to any tyrannical regime on Earth is still far away.  I actually wrote a book about spacefarers seeking freedom on Mars and how Earth tried to claw them back under their control, called 'The Greatest Vision.'  It's also available on the sidebar for anyone who wants to know what our future is going to look like.

Idolm@ster U149 has a blu-ray release, but at 93 gigabytes that's ridiculous.  There's zero reason for the filesizes to be that big.  Hopefully someone gives a reasonable version in the future.  The same problem exists with the Sousou no Frieren bluray.  No one has released the series with reasonable filesizes.

The War Within releases in August, shortly after the Olympics, so I know what I'll be doing from mid-July onwards.  But the month between then and now is looking awfully sparse.  I suppose there's still plenty of Precure left to rewatch.  I'm astounded there still isn't a pirate-able version of Parchment & Wolf volume 8.  All the previous volumes were released without issue.

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