Rimi:

The 1,811th wonderful character in my hall of fame is Rimi from History's Strongest Disciple Kenichi.  Rimi is a minor character, the same as Renka, who only appears in a small section of the manga.  However, there's a big difference between a minor character and an inconsequential character.  Renka is an inconsequential character, if she were taken out of the manga no one would notice.  She never mattered to anyone else in the series and she never changed the flow of events in the plot.  Rimi appeared on the scene like a supernova and became Miu's biggest rival, Ryuuto's lover, and Kensei's prized disciple.  She caused Ryuuto and Kenichi to fight Kensei, severing Ryuuto's ties with his master, and she taught Miu how to master her dou ki, an important powerup for her.

Every scene with Rimi in it was lovely.  She has the best character design in the series (a very long series with a lot of characters).  Her gothic lolita black dress is popping.  But she's constantly cosplaying in other outfits with the delightful reason that 'she thought [whichever man she's addressing] would enjoy it.'  And of course we, the reader, do enjoy every last cosplay.  She looks great in everything.  Her golden shoes used as training weights make for a delightful joke as Miu's greed always comes to the forefront around them.  Her open and all-powerful love for Ryuuto is the best among all the girls in the series.  That she keeps a blog of her own with delightful pictures of herself posing for the camera makes her an idol on top of everything else.  And her fights with Miu are the best fights in the series.  Her dedication to beating Miu and stopping at nothing to do so is on par with any heroics Kenichi showed in his fights.

Because Rimi was a minor character I'd forgotten all about her until I reread the manga, but I won't forget her again because she was a consequential character.  Because Rimi was a fast and intense warrior who awakened her latent potential through severe training, she receives the fast-paced and intense theme song 'Awakening' from Final Fantasy 11.

Nothing else of consequence has happened recently.  I finished Tales of Xillia Remastered -- it's so buggy that the game crashes against the last bosses and the arena bosses, making the game a pain instead of a pleasure, but you can get around the game crashes by setting the difficulty to 'easy' and beating the bosses instantly, before the bug occurs.  It's totally unacceptable that a game with such large bugs is on the market being sold as a finished product, especially since it's been a year since it was released, but at least I got the Japanese audio features I was listening for.

Trump's would-be assassin is a typical Democrat reciting the typical Democrat talking points.  I'm sure most Democrats consider him a hero who unfortunately failed.  But Trump can't really complain if he's assassinated because he himself ordered the assassination of Khamenei (along with the gratuitous murder of his granddaughter and other innocents in the vicinity) (alongside the massacre of 168 innocent schoolgirls and the massacre of over 100 unarmed sailors on a diplomatic trip to India).  Live by the sword, die by the sword.  My complaint is in a different trajectory, that the security was barely sufficient to stop one determined gunman from rushing the front door.  What if it had been five?  Why wasn't everyone checked for weapons at the entrance to the hotel and stopped right there?  It's absurd that lone gunmen can get that close to the President without any resistance.  Yet again the Secret Service totally made a buffoon of itself.  I am sick of the deep state intentionally not doing their job and making it so easy for these 'lone gunmen' to try their luck one after the next.  Everyone in the Secret Service should be fired and replaced by actual bodyguards who honestly want Trump to live.

In a recent Tucker Carlson interview, an ex-CIA guy admitted they supported Afghanistan's heroin cultivation because the drugs mostly went to Russia and Iran, harming the people of those countries.  This was considered a 'win' because they were our enemies.  Note this was done in 2001-forward, long before Russia 'brutally and unprovokedly invaded Crimea' or Georgia or any other imagined crimes.  Proving America has a blind hatred and genocidal intent towards Russia that has nothing to do with Russia's behavior.  Proving every conflict Russia gets into, from Chechnya forward, was in fact a shadow-campaign proxy war of America on Russia, and that America has always been the aggressor.  It's like we just can't accept winning the Cold War and want to punish Russia more.  Now we're supporting jihadis in Mali because this will destroy a Russia-friendly government.  Nevermind the chaos and carnage that will come to Malian citizens if jihadis take power.  All that matters is hurting Russia.  The reason we bombed Serbia under Clinton also takes on a new tint when you look at matters this way.  Were we really concerned for the poor Muslim minorities in Yugoslavia, or were we just destroying a historic ally of Russia with a throwaway excuse?

It now appears that America never stopped waging war on Russia, it immediately started plotting how to hurt it further the moment the USSR disbanded.  Why else would it expand NATO when the USSR no longer posed a threat to Europe?  Why did it support the Chechen terrorists and the Kosovar terrorists who were ethnically cleansing Serbs out of Kosovo?  Why did it convince Georgia to make a suicidal attack on Russian peacekeepers?  Why did it overthrow Ukraine's admitted-by-Wikipedia freely and fairly elected government in a coup when new elections were scheduled later that year?  It's famous how we stirred up Jihadis in Afghanistan to lure Russia into an unwinnable war there, but now it appears that didn't stop with the Cold War, we just kept on doing it all the way to the current war in Ukraine.  What is this inveterate vendetta about?  Russia has traditionally been an ally of America.  The only exception is the USSR, when Russians weren't even in control of their government (Stalin was Georgian, Kruschev was Ukrainian, as was Breznevh).  But even then, in the most important war, the USSR was our indispensable ally in WWII.  So whence does this hatred of Russia come?

I got all my seraphs in Heaven Burns Red to their max unit level.  But there's still a long slog of getting their memoria levels to max.  I suspect by the time I could manage that the level cap will have grown again, making the goal ever-elusive.  I also maxed out everyone's skill levels.  And I got base Risa's exclusive skill to introjection level.  It feels like a hollow victory when I failed to recruit the two new SS Memorias and lost my claim of owning every SS Memoria in the game, but I guess I'll take what I can get.

Witch Hat Atelier continues to impress, proving my rating of it as a great anime true.  Every episode is a visual spectacle, and the apprentices have all the virtues you could ask for -- courage, compassion, creativity and cognition.  I already knew Mao would be great from reading the manga so the Mao anime being great comes as no surprise.  But my eye of judgment when it comes to instantaneously recognizing great art remains unfailing.

There isn't much going on this upcoming May, the release of the Tenpure!! visual novel has been delayed, so I'll have to finally work on my video game backlog.  But this June it'll be back to sports via the World Cup.  Then in July there will be a new anime season featuring the conclusion of Bleach, and with August we're right back to football season.  When it comes to entertainment value, I have no complaints with 2026.  And in 2027 we'll probably see the conclusion to the epic FF7 Remake trilogy, one of the capstones of my entire life.  If so, I won't have any complaints with that year either. . .