Did you transcribe and translate that yourself? Thanks!

only kinda know of nichijou because of a meme (good morning evernyan! Oh my gah!) but so far I’m really digging this. I don’t get the connection tho??

That’s Azumanga Daioh, hence the confusion. If you look up something that’s actually from Nichijou the resemblance is obvious.

The art style is really cool and I was kinda shocked because I’ve never seen anime try to emulate depth of field like this before.

I think it’s probably the simplistic character designs that make it possible for the animators to go above and beyond with their cinematography. Simplistic character designs, talent, and hard work.

Stuff from last season:

• Apothecary Diaries - A solid ending for a solid show. Glad to say I liked the final episode of the season more than the penultimate one.
• Apocalypse Hotel - This show started out good and then very quickly became great. I was worried there wasn’t enough material to keep a team of robots running a hotel interesting but they certainly proved me wrong! Hard to say whether this or Mobile Suit Gundam GQuuuuuux was anime of the season for me.

Stuff from this season:

• The Summer Hikaru Died - A highly-rated horror yaoi manga brought to animation by the same studio that gave us Bang Brave Bang Bravern and the aforementioned Apocalypse Hotel. The first episode was pretty solid. Overall it looks pretty good, which is no guarantee when it comes to horror manga. Definitely good enough to get me interested in episode 2.
• City: The Animation - Same mangaka and animation studio as Nichijou, and it shows in all the right ways. It seems a little calmer than Nichijou so far, but that could very easily be because it spent most of its runtime introducing a wide cast of characters. Excited to see where it goes from here.
• Witch Watch - Witch Watch continues. It’s fun, but I’m not sure it holds up to the other shows I’m discussing here.
• Nyaight of the Living Cat - Haven’t seen the first episode yet, but I’m putting this here just to say I’ve seen the trailer and I am very intrigued. Hopefully I can rope my wife into watching this with me tonight.

Other stuff:

• Yakitate Japan!! - I mentioned this earlier, but this is an anime about making bread that’s better than another guy’s bread. There are bread tournament arcs and everything, judged by a zany character who is voiced by my favorite voice actor. It’s a wild time; I highly recommend it to anyone who wants a fun old relatively low-stress thing.
• Ghost in the Shell: Stand-alone Complex - I don’t know if I have much to say about this other than it’s good sci-fi and those who like good sci-fi should consider watching it.
• Gintama - I got back on the Gintama train recently. I’m somewhere around episode 220 and it continues to be funny as hell.
• Princess Jellyfish - My wife has been watching this one, and I’ve watched about an episode and a half with her. Seems like a good show; I’ll likely finish it at some point but I have no idea when.

I agree, Vivy was great. Really unfortunate that it got buried among the other great shows that keep coming out. I’d like to give it a rewatch but I have no idea when I’ll have the time with all this other anime to watch.

Horror yaoi? Looks fun. I didn’t love how the episode ended but I really enjoyed the rest of it and will definitely be giving episode 2 a look as well. The way “Hikaru’s” face melted when asked if he was really Hikaru was great.

They may not have been the highest-effort OP and ED, but it’s still pretty cool that they made an OP & ED just for the show the characters were watching in-universe.

Trailer here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MuWL_UPoGU

As a Fullmetal Alchemist fan I’m very much looking forward to this.

Felt a lot calmer than Nichijou, but maybe that’s just their respective OPs fooling me. IIRC Nichijou itself also takes a while to become truly great so I’m looking forward to what kind of gags we get once we’re through with the first wave of character introductions.

I’m sure some people liked it but that scene where everyone was talking about how great Gokuraku is felt pretty forced to me. “And then everybody clapped.” All the same, great manga and I look forward to seeing what the next arc brings us.

I don’t think there’s an industry on earth where it’s normal for the low-level workers to be paid directly when the customer buys something. It being filtered through a bunch of business stuff is the norm everywhere I’m afraid.

Yes, but do you think they’d buy the shows from those production committees and other organizations if people weren’t interested in paying subscriptions to watch them? That’s like saying Bandai doesn’t get money when I buy gunpla from a store like usagunplastore just because usagunplastore already bought the gunpla from Bandai months ago and Bandai isn’t getting more money from that particular purchase.

Animators being horribly underpaid is a different topic entirely.

That’s without even discussing the fact that not a single penny users give them will end up in the hands of any of the exploited artists who actually made the shows

That’s quite the assertion. How exactly do you suggest they’re buying the rights to distribute the shows then?

given that there are still plenty of passionate fans who would have done it for free

I’d imagine this is a non-starter from a corporate standpoint. I know if I were in charge I’d be terrified of the idea of just trusting community-submitted subtitles to not have random slurs or something inserted. That said I still think it would be super cool if they’d let people source and use their own subtitle files; I now it’s possible because I have a tampermonkey script that lets me do just that.

I haven’t noticed anything funky in the English subs but it’s unfortunately no surprise that they’d be using AI-generated subs for languages with lower viewership.

The teaser trailer opens with a light-hearted moment of Shiori filming a dance video with friends, but quickly takes a dark turn as she becomes trapped in the smartphone world

Oh okay, so this is anime TRON. Except that when the original TRON was made computers were a representation of how cool the future would be. Now smartphones are a representation of how tech companies have leveraged our psychological flaws to trap us in unhealthy relationships with social media, mobile games, etc.

I enjoyed the original Macross so I’ll probably give this a look but unfortunately I expect it to be a depressing time.

Yeah but in Bazzite’s case one of those issues (the one from about a year ago) hit over 99% of their users. I really think that all these people talking about how great Bazzite is either haven’t been using it for long enough for the devs to have fucked up or they just haven’t noticed that their system hasn’t been updating for the past year.

Glad to hear you enjoyed it!

it wasn’t from a studio I was familiar with

Yeah, this came out of nowhere. Previously the studio had mostly done a mediocre job of things so it was a pleasant surprise when the Medalist adaptation ended up being competently put together! That said, now it’s time to also recommend the manga. Season 2 has been announced, which is certainly something to be excited for, but advancing the story isn’t the only reason to read the manga - it’s also worth it because of how great the art is. I mean, look at this portrayal of Hikaru pulling Inori at top-speed, “as if the ice itself were propelling her”:

Seriously, we’re at max expressiveness here:

The skating looks great too!

The problem with using Bazzite as the solution to new users bricking their Linux installs is I’ve had Bazzite’s update utility break itself 3 times now. I couldn’t possibly recommend this distro to someone after that. I literally switched my desktop back to Arch for reliability reasons. Ridiculous.

Well I’m not aware of any Arch-based immutable distro besides SteamOS so it’s kinda hard to give a perfect answer.

The Spring seasonals from my perspective:

• Apocalypse Hotel - I’ve watched the first 6 episodes so far. Seems fun, will hopefully finish within a few weeks.
• Apothecary Diaries - This has been a good time overall, though there are some parts in recent episodes where it’s clear a scene probably worked better in writing than in animation.
• I’m the Evil Lord of an Intergalactic Empire! - Watching the main character exist was actively unpleasant for me; I couldn’t even finish one episode.
• Kowloon Generic Romance - Seems very interesting. Watched the first 3 episodes but the pacing threw me off so I think I’m going to seek out the manga and read that instead. Might come back to the anime afterwards if I like the manga.
• Mobile Suit Gundam GQuuuuuux - This had a banger of an ending. Wild show. Some people might think it’s paced too quickly; I personally found it engaging and fun this way. Easily my anime of the season. Wish I could recommend it to everyone, but I’m not sure it’s the best choice for those who haven’t seen the original Mobile Suit Gundam. wjs018 seemed to be enjoying it for a while though so maybe it’s fine.
• Witch Watch - The animation is kinda meh but I love the characters and the goofs are fun. Will continue watching this one into Summer.

As for summer, I have my eye on a few things:

• City - Same mangaka as Nichijou, same studio as Nichijou. Need I say more?
• The Summer Hikaru Died - I don’t know much about this but I heard the manga was good and it’s being adapted by Cygames so odds are pretty good that it’ll be worth my time.
• Dan Da Dan Season 2 - If this is adapting the manga arc I think it’s adapting this is the part of Dan Da Dan where you realize that Season 1 was relatively calm and restrained actually. I can’t wait.