#and its incredibly funny to me that its an 11 year old japanese girl and an immortal european

[note-boom]

Something something a child and her immortal, all powerful eldritch being who only cares about her and listens to no one else

[for-the-freaks-and-geeks-ptii]

all odd numbers, go

1. selfie

That’ll be its own post

3. do you miss anyone?

Old friends. On occasion.

5. is there anyone who can always make you smile?

My sisters and my closest friends. My best friends I’ve had since I was like 5

7. what was your life like last year?

The same but colder. It was fucking freezing in Cali last year.

9. who did you last see in person?

My sisters. I picked em up from school today.

11. are you listening to music right now?

Childish Gambino’s new album

13. how do you feel right now?

Kinda hungry. Kinda horny.

15. personality description

I’m calm, funny, warm, and caring. I’d put someone else’s needs before my own a thousand times.

17. opinion on insecurities.

Everyone is of course entitled to have them. I hope that everyone with an insecurity works on it. Bit by bit. You should never feel ashamed to be the way the are or look the way you look.

19. have you ever been to New York?

No. I’m a west coast man.

21. age and birthday?

April 27. Just passed recently actually

23. fear(s)

Heights. Only thing in my life I’m uneasy around. Came from a childhood trauma but I’m better about it these days

25. role model

My grandfather. Best man I knew. I love each day trying to be as good as he was. Hopefully better.

27. things i hate

Bullies. Arrogance. Entitlement. Capitalism. Pickles. You’ll call me an old man for this but TikTok. I think social media is inherently harmful for teenagers but TikTok trends actually have hurt and killed people. Kids should be safe. Always.

29. favourite film(s)

I’m a big movie guy so that’s a long list. Just assume that if you have a favorite movie I’ve also seen it and love it. Godzilla minus one? Incredible. Tarantino movies? Love em but I know there’s problems with a few of em. Horror movies? The genre of horror is so good and survivor girls are my favorite. The big short? Baby Driver? Barbie? Spider-Verse? Too many to think of

31. 3 random facts

About me or in general? Uuuh…I know Japanese, Spanish and English. I’ve met Emma Stone (briefly) cause they filmed part of the amazing spider-man 2 at my high school over the summer and I was there one day to turn in something or other. I’m a virgin.

33. something you want to learn

Archery. Looks fun

35. favourite subject

In school? English. I’ve never had anything lower than an A in English. My ability to retain written information is top notch.

37. favourite actor/actress

Keanu Reeves. He’s really down to earth and kind despite his overwhelming popularity. I like humility.

39. favourite sport(s)

I’m not a sports guy.

41. relationship status

Single cause intimacy scares me

43. favourite song ever

That’s impossible to answer. Music fits your mood and moods change constantly

45. how you found out about your idol

My what?

47. turn ons

Brutal honesty. Short hair. Intelligence. Mettle. Wit.

49. where i want to be right now

A nice little beach area just south of Santa Barbara. Either with family or friends or a significant other if I ever got one of those

51. starsign

Taurus?

53. 5 things that make me happy

Friends, food, travel, family and video games

55. tumblr friends

I’ve made several. Many were lost in the purge. Myself included. They’re cute dorky horny types.

57. favourite animal(s)

Dogs. They’ve all liked me and I them. Never met an animal that was hostile towards me. I make peace with most creatures very quickly

59. why i joined tumblr

I was in high school and found out you could post porn on it and post about nerdy stuff. Plus no one I knew irl followed me so I ran rampant. Met lots of other nerdy horny people. Freaks and geeks

Thanks for asking 💜

[coolgreatwebsite]

Cool Games I Finished In 2019 (In No Real Order)

We’re here. The end of the decade. 2019 was a weird, turbulent year for me. Despite my cross-country move already being a year behind me somehow, nothing’s really settled yet. Living situation is still weird, still separated from most of my belongings, I left my full-time QA job for a contractor position at a mobile game advertising company that may or may not convert into a full-time position... everything about what’s going on with me still just feels like I’m completely winging it, and while that’s not a position I’m really comfortable being in for such an extended amount of time, everything seems to be working out okay enough despite it. All this is probably why I spent most of my time playing the shit out of a handful of games rather than playing a bunch of different games this year! Needed some sort of stability. Also when I did manage to pull myself away from the timesink games and play something else, a lot of them ranged from “okay” to “real bad”. But I still managed to play just enough stuff that I liked to where I can put out yet another one of these.  Here’s a bunch of cool games I experienced for the first time in 2019.

Phantasy Star Online: Blue Burst (PC, 2005)

I haven’t bothered to do two thirds of the story quests yet and have barely touched any Episode 4 content so this game technically doesn’t count for this list, but if I left it off I would be neglecting to mention an extremely large portion of my video game playing time this year. I fell back into PSO preeeettty hard this year after the surprise announcement of Phantasy Star Online 2 finally coming to the US. Guess what: game still rules. It feels stiff to play and it’s obviously far less expansive than it seemed back in 2000, but the core of Phantasy Star Online is still as fun as it ever was and the aesthetics are still entirely my shit. I love everything about the way this game looks and sounds, I love stumbling on a weird new weapon, I love participating in the custom seasonal events the server I’m on runs, and I love how oddly relaxing the experience of playing this game and taking it all in is. I will probably continue to play Phantasy Star Online into 2020. I will probably still dip back into it after PSO2 US servers finally launch. If I know you and you want to join my Discord server for PSO get at me. PSO forever.

Cookie’s Bustle (PC, 1999)

You ever play a game that just speaks to you? Even through a language barrier? A game so incredibly out there and bizarre in the exact way you love that you can’t help but adore it despite barely understanding it? Holy moly did I ever find that game. I learned about Cookie’s Bustle through a news story last year about some rare games leaking from a Japanese collector’s stash. Didn’t manage to get it to run back then, but my off and on attempts to get it working finally paid off in March of this year and I’m so glad I kept trying. I knew nothing of this game other than it had a weird name and was about a bear doing sports, and it turned out to be a fully voice-acted and mostly unsubtitled adventure game starring Cookie Blair, a 5 year old girl from New Jersey who sees herself as a teddy bear and has traveled to Bombo World, an island nation once visited by aliens and currently in the middle of a civil war, to participate in the Bombo Sports Tournament. Dead level, I probably shouldn’t have been able to genuinely love Cookie’s Bustle as much as I did. The only context I had for what was happening and what I was supposed to do was provided by a 20-year-old Google translated walkthrough with broken images, the game’s slightly higher than usual reliance on English loan words, and 30-ish years of video games and anime allowing me to halfway pick up on a handful of Japanese words. However, Cookie’s Bustle is dripping with an undeniable and off-beat charm that genuinely transcends language. Even if you can’t understand the words and specifics, you can understand the basic plot, characterizations, and emotions they’re going for. Cookie’s Bustle manages to both be completely off-the-wall bizarre and feel totally genuine and heartfelt at the same time, a balance very few games manage to successfully hit but many of my favorites do. One could say that’s why it seems to have resonated with a decent amount of other people this year, too. Games rarely make me feel sad that they’re over. but when they do that’s how I know they’re one of the good ones. Seriously, go look up a longplay or stream of Cookie’s Bustle if you (understandably) don’t want to go through the hassle of setting it up and figuring out how to play it, it’s impossible not to love.

Devil May Cry 5 (PlayStation 4, 2019)

Here’s something crazy to think about: Devil May Cry 4 came out 11 years ago. Aside from being a potent reminder that time is moving too fast and we’re all going to die soon, that means that there hasn’t been a DMC for over a decade. Devil May Cry 5 does not bare this fact even a little bit. Not only did they pick up right where they left off and manage to make another Devil May Cry game without missing a beat, they made arguably the best Devil May Cry game. I mean I still like the story and single-character focus of DMC3 the best, but DMC5 is the best playing game in the series without a doubt. Nero finally feels like he has a complete and complex toolset, Dante is the most mechanically dense and fun to play he’s ever been, and they even added a new guy that’s... neat to play as, until you start trying to S-rank the harder difficulties. Then he’s kind of annoying to play as. But it’s still cool that they tried something totally different and mostly got it to work! They also did something very stupid that I love and used this game as an excuse to make literally every single piece of Devil May Cry media canon. Like, characters exclusively from the anime and the books show up and act like they’re someone you already know and love? And they go out of their way to explain the most esoteric lore shit possible?? And despite it all they still intentionally give DMC2 as short a shrift as they can??? It’s so dumb, it rules. It’s just one of the many things about the game that show that even with so long of a gap between entries, no love for the series was lost by the people that make it. I don’t think the suits at Capcom expected this game to hit as hard as it did though, because despite there being clear areas where the game could be expanded on with DLC there still hasn’t been anything announced. I hope they’re maybe saving it for some sort of DMC3-esque special edition, or maybe just already working on DMC6, because even after getting all S-ranks I still wanted to play more. The game’s just that damn good.

Hypnospace Outlaw (PC, 2019)

I expected very little from Hypnospace Outlaw. I backed the game on Kickstarter solely because it looked cool and I thought a game about fake GeoCities was neat, and then I immediately forgot about it until it released. Admittedly my lack of expectations stemmed mostly from the fact that it’s kind of hard to set expectations for a game you never really thought too hard about, but even in the brief period of time where I considered it enough to give it money, I never expected it to be much more than a pretty-looking 101 Great GeoCities Jokez delivery vehicle. Boy was I wrong. I mean, it is incredibly good at that, but Hypnospace Outlaw is so much more than a funny period piece. The basic premise is that you’re in alternate universe 1999 and have just become a community moderator for an Internet service provider that allows people to connect to the Internet while they sleep. You’re tasked with browsing the game’s weird fake Internet and issuing demerits to users who violate the five basic Hypnospace rules, but it quickly evolves into something way bigger. Hypnospace Outlaw’s greatest strength is its exceptional ability at weaving together subtle world building, small and engaging character arcs, esoteric microjokes, and a genuine sense of mystery and discovery into an incredibly cohesive and engaging package. It’s as much a game about the people that use and run its weird fake Internet as it is about that weird fake Internet itself. And a lot of the problems both face echo the problems we face with our real world Internet today. When I was mapping out writing this article like a month or two ago I was prepared to go on about how at its core, Hypnospace Outlaw is an incredibly poignant story about how uncaring tech corporations actively harm their users and always have, but then a couple of days ago I read Colin Spacetwinks’ game of the year list and his #1 entry put most everything I would have said about that topic down in a way more eloquent and well-written way than I ever could have. And then I remembered that Friend Of The Site Heidi Kemps covered some of the same angle but from the perspective of the early Internet in an article earlier this year, again way better than I could have. So I highly recommend you read those when you’re done here. What I wanna bring up instead is just how effortlessly surprising and interconnected a lot of stuff in Hypnospace feels, using a mildly spoiler-ish late game example. Two of the first “zones” you’re allowed to moderate when you start Hypnospace Outlaw are Teentopia and Goodtime Valley, which are essentially alternate universe Yahooligans and a little slice of Hypnospace just for Boomers respectively. On Teentopia you’ll see a bunch of kids that are wild for Squisherz, Hypnospace’s alternate universe version of Pokémon, and over in Goodtime Valley you’ll see (much like there was back in real world 1999) a few pages made by religious fundamentalists convinced that everything the kids like these days is the work of Satan. This of course includes Squisherz, and you can find a page by one organization full of crackpot conspiracy theories with flimsy evidence that TOTALLY DEFINITELY backs up their claim. Squisherz contains a wolf, which the Bible warns about many times! This giraffe monster CLEARLY has a pentagram in its design!! And the eye of this snake-like Squisherz is the eye of Horus, an Egyptian occult symbol and NEED I REMIND YOU that Lucifer took the form of a snake in the Garden of Eden!!! It is very clear what this page is goofing on and throughout the course of the game it doesn’t get updated at all, so it’s very easy to laugh at it and forget about it. Very late into the game, you get an optional sidequest. Adrian Merchant, one of the CEOs of Merchantsoft, the company that created Hypnospace, was found out to have logged traffic indicating he was a frequent visitor of a website called Children of HORUS, and a call is put out to investigate what that even is. You can easily find the website, but it asks you for a password if you click the Enter button. Adrian Merchant is consistently portrayed throughout the game as a complete idiot, and the solution to this puzzle has you capitalize on that. Another early game objective ended up with you finding a list of cracked passwords, and one of those passwords happens to be for the instant messenger account of Adrian Merchant. If you can remember that he was even in that text file from forever ago, and then put two and two together that of COURSE that dumbass would use the same password for everything, you just punch in his messenger password and you’re granted access to the Children of HORUS page. It turns out that HORUS is an acronym that stands for Hiding Occult References in Utmost Secrecy, and the page itself is a basic leaderboard with a list of names and two numbered columns reading “Hidden” and “Found”. In that list of names you’ll find A. Merchant, along with the names of various other CEOs and celebrities you might have read about elsewhere in Hypnospace. One of the other names on this list is F. Kazuma, the CEO of Monarch, creators of Squisherz. The funny conspiracy theory website from the beginning of the game that you most likely forgot about was, about this one specific thing, correct. There was an eye of Horus hidden on the snake from Squisherz. Not as any sort of Satanic plot, mind you, but only as part of some weird millionaire dickwaving contest. This dumb tiny revelation is not called out by the game at all and nothing comes of it, it’s just there for you to notice if you’ve been paying enough attention. Hypnospace Outlaw is LITTERED with stuff like this. Weird small interconnected things you wouldn’t expect to be interconnected. Little dumb things you wouldn’t expect to have any sort of payoff but somehow do. And it’s also just as chock full of big things. Having all the pieces fall into place at once to where I was able to access Hypnospace’s equivalent of the dark web was the best sequence in a game this year for me, even beating out the outlandish shit in DMC5. Getting and solving the final case was a rush. Hypnospace Outlaw is full of incredible moments big and small. It’s genuinely engaging and affecting, which is so much more than I was expecting from a game that was pitched to me as “Funny GeoCities Cop”. It almost has no right being so good. But it is. Hell, even the music rules! I didnt even get into that! I don't have enough time or space to get into that now! The music is so goddamn good! I know I started these lists because I had no interest in ranking games, but every year I sort of jokingly-but-not-jokingly say “haha this game sure would be my number one if I did that!” for at least one game. It’s time to fully lean into it. I don’t gotta rank ‘em all, but I can pick a favorite. Hypnospace Outlaw is my favorite game of 2019 with a goddamn bullet.

These games were also cool, I just had less to say about them:

Etrian Odyssey (Nintendo DS, 2007): Man, this series just started out good, huh? I dabbled with the first two games in college when I got a DS flashcart but never really dug in until EO4, and the first game is enjoyable in just about every way the modern ones are. Definitely more barebones and punishing though. Kero Blaster (PlayStation 4, 2017): This is a game by the creator of Cave Story that does not aim to be Cave Story, and that’s fine! A fun little shooter in its own right, though I do think the shooting in Cave Story felt a little better than it does here. Space Invaders Extreme (Nintendo DS, 2008): I played the shit out of this game in college thanks to that flashcart I mentioned before, but I never finished a playthrough in full until this year for some reason. Still way stylish and way fun! I need to get a copy of the second one... CROSSNIQ+ (Nintendo Switch, 2019): Incredibly chill puzzle game that can be as hard or easy as you want it to be. Almost uncanny in how well it emulates the style of late PS1/Dreamcast games. Super Mario Maker 2 (Nintendo Switch, 2019): Mario Maker 2 is kind of weird for me. It’s a solid improvement in a lot of aspects, but a clear regression in a lot of others. Also the online multiplayer is the second least amount of fun I’ve had with a video game this year (Secret of Mana swooped in and stole the number one slot near the end). Still, I had a lot of fun with it and I’ll probably end up going back to it eventually. Katamari Damacy Reroll (Nintendo Switch, 2018): The original Katamari Damacy is still every bit as fun and charming as it was upon its original release. This port is weirdly based on the Japanese version with the English text inserted, which means no English voice acting and Wanda Wanda only plays in the multiplayer mode. The Joycon sticks also aren’t the greatest for doing charge rolls. But none of these faults detract too much from the game. Bring on We Love Katamari Reroll! Earth Defense Force 5 (PlayStation 4, 2018): Sandlot somehow keeps finding ways to make each new EDF bigger and explodier, and EDF5 is the biggest and explodiest yet. I think the mission design in 4.1 was more solid overall, but 5 feels the best to play and has the most fun tools. Also the dialogue is the most absurd its ever been, and the final boss goes for it way harder than the series ever has. Pokémon Shield (Nintendo Switch, 2019): This game is honestly just okay, but leaving it off would again be neglecting a game I put a ton of time into this year. Pokémon Sword is fun in the way most Pokémon games usually are, and extremely half-baked in basically every other aspect. I’m still having a good time putting together teams and finding shinies and doing The Pokémon Thing regardless.

And that’s 2019 (and this decade) in the bag! I don’t know where anything’s going from here, but I’m going to ride it out as best as I can! I hope you do too! As always, thank you so much for getting to the bottom of all these words. I’m hoping to be in a more stable place mid-2020, and then I want to get back to all the things I haven’t had time to do. I want to get back to streaming, I want to write more dumb articles like The Best Babies, I want to do it all! I hope I will be able to do it all. Until then!

[rieshon]

Winter 2020 Power Rankings

Time to catch up on writing some good old Power Rankings.

1. Eizouken ni wa Te wo Dasu na!: It's hard not to fall for Eizouken's infectious love for all aspects of the art of animation. They even pay respect to the people who make sound effects. I respect Yuasa, but most of his works don't really appeal to me--but Eizouken can be appreciated by anyone who's ever loved a piece of animation. ★★★★☆

2. Oshi ga Budoukan Ittekuretara Shinu: The first law of idol anime is they're always better than you think they will be. I had high hopes for Oshibudo and it still managed to exceed them. Idols and yuri are not an uncommon combination (even if it's usually just subtext) but Oshibudo manages to mix lesbian themes with the purest and most genuine depiction of idol fandom possible to make a truly delicious gay idol smoothie. ★★★★☆

3. 22/7: Speaking of idol anime always overperforming... I thought this would be a 'so bad it's good' show based on its first episode but instead it's just so good its good. A compellingly weird frame story that plays with criticism of idols just enough to be interesting props up an impeccably well done anthology series about several girls and their disparate paths to the idol industry. Some of the eps are magical, some are relative duds, but the sum of it all is an incredibly endearing series. ★★★☆☆

4. SHOW BY ROCK!! Mashumairesshu!!: Speaking of gay idols... The original Show By Rock was an okay series with yuri subtext that I mostly liked because Ayaneru was in it, but this spinoff trims all the fat from that series and delivers pure gay band girls and it's brilliant. No weird sci-fi drama, no laser fights between CGI gerbils, just some extremely gay girls starting a band. ★★★☆☆

5. Itai no wa Iya nanode Bougyoryoku ni Kyokufuri Shitai to Omoimasu.: At the risk of sounding like a broken record, Oonuma Shin always fucking delivers. Boufuri comes off as a boring MMORPG anime at first, but as a truly admirable "commitment to the bit" sees our protagonist Maple grow to literally God-like strength, it starts to worm its way into your heart. There's some great moments like Maple turning into a mech or a fluffball or fucking around and breaking sidequests, but for the most part it's just an extremely competent anime made by, still, the most underrated director in the business. ★★★☆☆

6. Koisuru Asteroid: It's a shame for a Kirara anime to ever be described with the term "disappointing" but Asteroid just doesn't deliver enough astronomy or geology and has way too much melodrama. The girls are still cute as fuck and it definitely hits most of the good Kirara anime notes, but it's decidedly a second-tier Kirara series. Also I'm still mad at them for ruining Suzu's hair. ★★★☆☆

7. Rikei ga Koi ni Ochita no de Shoumei Shite Mita: This is definitely a funny premise, but it's also one of those comedy shows where they really only have one joke that they do over and over. Still, it's hard not to enjoy Amamiya Sora as a cool and standoffish science babe, and by the time the gag is getting old the show wraps up with a surprisingly strong resolution to the romantic tension in the series. ★★★☆☆

8. ID:INVADED: This is the kind of show I almost never actually watch, but every so often I stumble upon one of these male-led action-thrillers that really manages to tickle my fancy. ID takes a compelling premise--it's like Minority Report except the detectives have to solve weird metafictional puzzles in scenarios derived from the psyches of the killers--and spins it out into an enjoyable science fiction action-adventure romp. As a piece of sf it doesn't say much more than "me am play gods," but it manages to be genuinely cool in premise and execution and also has a cute loli BBA. ★★★☆☆

9. Kuutei Dragons: CG anime conspiracy continues with this well made adventure story about whaling but it's in the sky. Unfortunately its addressing of the ethics of whaling is too wishy-washy to be interesting and it has some weird tonal stuff like setting up a "dude saves girl from prostitution" plot arc and then just not doing it so we just have to assume she like... goes back to whoring herself I guess? But this is never even addressed? It's weird, but the show has some pretty beautiful visuals for a CGI show and the ending arc is pretty satisfying. It queerbaited me with that Za-san character though. ★★★☆☆

10. Magia Record Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magica Gaiden: Madoka is probably in my top ten anime of all time, so just the existence of a shitty cash-in mobile game based on it pains me, much less seeing the entire franchise pivoting to selling it instead of more actual Madoka. Magia Record is bad in multiple dimensions; not only is it a poor imitation of the original masterpiece in both style and tone, the writing takes some truly disastrous turns with respect to the original series's canon. But I'mma be real with you... Yachiyo is the hottest anime girl of the year and she's hard gay for Iroha. So two stars. ★★☆☆☆

11. Murenase! Seton Gakuen: It feels like there's A LOT of "animal people" shows lately... This is another one. The girls in this are enjoyable thanks to great character designs from Sasaki Masakatsu who always manages to impart a very understated but tangible lewdness to all his characters. ★★☆☆☆

12. Kyokou Suiri: I really like 'talking anime' and I really loved listening to Kitou Akari talk for almost the entire runtime of this whole series. She's definitely a real one. It was also nice to see a romance with a cute disabled character whose disability is only really there in the background. Kotoko was just cute as fuck with an impeccable fashion sense. The story is kind of meh, especially once it gets into the meat of the Koujin Nanase arc, but it's worth it just to see Kotoko and Kurou's cute interactions. ★★☆☆☆

13. Nekopara: I wish Nekopara was better, and lewder, especially given that the franchise literally has its origins in porn doujinshi, but it still has lots of cute cat girls. Even if they do live in Saudi Catrabia. Maple is best cat. ★★☆☆☆

14. Ishuzoku Reviewers: The fact that this show became such a sensation is truly a testament to the power of anime tiddies. Unfortunately the character designs in this show do very little for me even when the characters are ones that aren't objectionably weird (which is infrequent) which is pretty much a fatal flaw for an anime that's supposed to be all about getting horny and nutting. Too thicc for me, man. I admire its gumption but in the end I didn't actually enjoy the show that much. I did learn the Japanese word for "cloaca" though. ★☆☆☆☆

[disappointingyet]

This is a list of my favourite films of the year. That sounds like a simple statement, but in some quarters the long-running arguments about what is and isn’t a film got very heated in 2017. Even the year bit of that can get very messy.

But for at least this one last time, I’m keeping things simple: these are the films I enjoyed most out of the ones that were released in UK cinemas in 2017.*

There were plenty of films I didn’t see: some I wanted to but didn’t get round to – Colossal is the one that stands out. Others I just wasn’t drawn to – Detroit, Dunkirk (give money to Christopher Nolan and he’ll only keep making movies) and the critically adored Call Me By Your Name (the super-annoying title probably didn’t help).

There were lots of movies I did see and like, though, and that’s what we’re here to talk about…

*This decision was made simpler because I didn’t love any of the films that Netflix streamed without even giving a token cinema release, which included Noah Baumbach’s The Meyerowitz Stories (New And Selected) and Sundance favourite I Don’t Feel At Home In This World Anymore. The best of the bunch was The Incredible Jessica James.

1. Manchester By The Sea

Back in October 2016, I wrote: ‘If a better film is released in the UK in 2017, I’ll be very impressed.’ Well, I have been impressed by the excellent movies below on this list, but none of them beat Manchester By The Sea as far as I’m concerned. In outline, it sounds like nothing special: a story of some grim stuff happening to a fairly ordinary family, in particular a bloke who likes to pick fights in bars and his teenage nephew. But writer-director Kenneth Lonergan turns the ingredients for a predictable drama into something very special, not least by lacing this grief-laden story with lots of (appropriately) funny moments.

Full review here

2. The Handmaiden

A lot of the films on this list are fairly light on plot, so if you want a movie with scheming, counter-scheming and deception, not to mention pretty costumes, sex, cherry blossoms, perviness (its 18 certificate is richly earned) plus differing Korean views of their Japanese occupiers, this is the one. It’s directed by Park Chan-wook, best known for Old Boy, and loosely based on Sarah Waters’ Victorian-set melodrama Fingersmith, which turns out to be perfectly suited to Korea in the 1930s.

Full review here

3. Certain Women

Resolutely low-key collection of three slightly overlapping short stories set in wintery Montana. It’s a character piece, with Laura Dern, Michelle Williams and (the excellent, previously little-known) Lily Gladstone leading each segment. Director Kelly Reichardt knows exactly who these women are, and how the place they live shapes them. It seems modest at first, but it stuck in my mind long after flashier films had faded away.

Full review here

4. Moonlight

So much of what I read about Moonlight made it sound so much less interesting than it is. Around awards time, you could have easily formed the impression it was a heart-tugging issue movie, not helped by the campaign to get Naomi Harris an Oscar (‘Look! Pretty woman getting grubby to play junkie skank!’)**

What makes it a remarkable film – and it is a remarkable film – are the extraordinary cinematography and the telling of the story via often fragmentary scenes, and how little is explained, at least until the much more conventional, even theatrical (and thus slightly disappointing) final segment. Great moviemaking is about the how, not the what.

Full review here

**The classic awards-season tendency to grade performances by perceived difficulty points led to people talking about Harris rather than the way better Janelle Monae.

5. The Happiest Day In The Life Of Olli Mäki

Lovely, bittersweet based-on-real-life tale of Mäki, a small man who was Finnish boxing’s big hope in the early 1960s. It’s not really a boxing film, more a story about two decent young people trying to work out what they want. Which probably doesn’t sound like the most gripping core of a film, but it works. My favourite Finnish film of the year, narrowly shading…

Full review here

6. The Other Side Of Hope

Why should social realism be the only way of looking at problems like the refugee crisis? Aki Kaurismäki brings his taste for dramatic lighting, deadpan acting and vintage rock’n’roll to this story of a young Syrian braving bureaucracy and street racism in Helsinki. Less funny than most Kaurismäki films, but I found it very moving.

Full review here

7. Spider-Man: Homecoming

I’ve had enough of super heroes on screen – Marvel’s The Defenders on Netflix was the last straw. I’m voting for a moratorium on them*** and gangsters. So it took a lot to persuade me to see yet another Spider-Man reboot. ‘Don’t think of it as an action movie, think of it as a high-school comedy,’ said my friend Jess, and she was right. It’s nimble and funny and doesn’t take itself too seriously – the best surprise of the year.

Full review here

***I’m totally prepared to believe that Thor: Ragnarok is enjoyable in a bonkers, proggy kind of way, but I’m not risking it. Too many people insisted Captain America: Civil War was good.

8. The Death Of Stalin

After dealing with the (by comparison small) monsters of the Blair era in The Thick Of It, Armando Iannucci turns to the worst – by at least one measure – men in history: Beria, Molotov and Uncle Joe himself. 

I don’t think by portraying the farcical nature of the days after Stalin’s death the film is disrespectful to all those who died. I think humour has always been part of how we confront the horror. 

The Death Of Stalin has the best ensemble cast of the year – Jeffrey Tambor as Malenkov, Steve Buscemi as Khrushchev, Jason Isaacs giving the performance of his career as Marshal Zhukov, and – best of all – Simon Russell Beale as Beria. And, crucially, it’s definitely a film, not a bit of TV that has snuck on to the big screen.

9. Daphne

Essentially, a classic US indie movie transplanted from Brooklyn to Walworth. The title character is a pretentious and self-centred 30-year-old failing to get her life together – she’s just like women I used to meet at parties in south London 10 or 15 years ago. That could make for a dull film, of course, but the writing, the feel for the place and Emily Beecham as Daphne make it funny and involving.

Full review here

10. After The Storm

Once promising writer with a gambling problem becomes low-rent PI and uses his new skills to keep tabs on his ex. If you think you can imagine how this film goes from that description, you’re probably miles from Hirokazu Kore-eda’s typically patient, generous-spirited and occasionally funny family drama.

Full review here

11. A Ghost Story

Or that one with the white-sheet-with-eye-holes phantom. A Ghost Story is definitely a film you either buy into or you don’t, an austere tale about grief and loss. I did, and found it sad and moving and pleasingly different. 

Full review here

12. Neruda

It’s a playful movie about a playful title character – the Chilean poet and dilettante politician during his dramatic time on the run from the authorities –  but Neruda has a melancholy underlying mood that rises to the surface as the film goes on. It’s a smart, complex and entertaining film.

Full review here

13. The Florida Project

A group of small kids living in a low-rent long-stay motel have adventures and misbehave a bit. And that’s mostly it, with a few dips into the struggles of the mother of one of the kids, plus a sense of the endless patience and generosity of spirit of the motel manager (Willem Dafoe, the sole big name in the cast). What’s impressive is the way Sean Baker maintains a tone that manages to dodge both ‘look at what grindingly terrible lives poor folk lead’ and being a whimsical adorable-kids-running-wild picture. It does drag a little about three quarters of the way in, but the ending pulls it back.

14. La La Land

First it was an instant masterpiece that was going to change the game, then it was a deflating bubble as the haters managed to shout louder than the lovers. So which take on this nostalgia-soaked showbiz musical do I agree with? Well, there are problems with the film – mostly to do with director Damien Chazelle’s continuing attempts to foist his rotten ideology of music on the rest of us via his movies – but I think the people who were swooning were closer to the truth than the raspberry blowers.  

Full review here

15. Lady Macbeth

Bracingly bleak and at times hard to watch, this is very much in the anti-heritage industry counter-tradition of British period dramas. It’s about the rebellion of a young woman against a grim arranged marriage in Victorian Yorkshire, a struggle that makes strange and grim turns. Unpleasant, but an impressive and memorable piece of filmmaking.

Full review here

16. Blade Of The Immortal

‘Blood-drenched’ would be an understatement when it comes to this gleefully violent supernatural samurai tale in which an almost unkillable ronin is hired by a young girl to revenge her father’s death. If it doesn’t match up to veteran director Takashi Miike’s kinetic 2010 masterpiece 13 Assassins, Blade Of The Immortal is still full of staggering set pieces. Not for the squeamish.

Full review here

17. I Am Not Your Negro

In a variant on the title of this blog, I’d describe this documentary as kind of unsatisfactory yet powerful. It’s got a curious premise: it’s an ‘adaptation’ of a book that was only vaguely started: James Baldwin’s look at the meaning of the lives and deaths of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. 

The result is a slightly rambling wander through what Baldwin wrote and said about black lives in America. The clips of Baldwin on TV and at the Oxford Union are electrifying. The chunks of his writing are beautifully read by Samuel L Jackson in a warm, wise deep oak-aged voice than sounds precisely nothing like either Samuel L Jackson or James Baldwin. 

Dropped in around the place are news stills from the last couple of years by way of saying, ‘Yes, Obama made it to the presidency, but otherwise things are still fucked.’ That’s a bit clumsy and crude. What makes the film is Baldwin himself – a great writer (I’m still annoyed that someone nicked my copy of The Fire Next Time in 1991) but also a figure who confounds our condescension of past times: here was a black gay man who was an international public intellectual in the 1960s.

Best old films I saw on the big screen

Scarface

Not every rapper’s favourite movie – this is the terrific 1932 original, a ripped-from-the-headlines account of the rise of a ruthless Chicago gangster that’s as electrifyingly urgent as current organised-crime dramas are weary. 

Full review here

Un Flic

Jean-Pierre Melville, whose career stretched from the 1940s to ’70s, made some of my favourite films ever – Bob Le Flambeur, Le Samurai, Army Of The Shadows – and the BFI showed all of them in a splendid full retrospective this autumn. Of the ones I’d never seen before, my favourite was Un Flic, his last film, a bleak, minimalist film in which a laconic, sadistic cop (Alain Delon) slowly gets on the trail of a heist crew. Moody, stylised and very cool.

Full review here

The Cobweb

Over the top, and unashamedly so, Vincente Minnelli’s undervalued mid-’50s melodrama is set in a psychiatric clinic, has a great cast and a plot in which the choice of a set of curtains causes all manner of scheming, bitching and betrayal. 

Full review here

La Vérité

An uncharacteristically meaty role for Brigitte Bardot is at the centre of this courtroom drama from Henri-Georges Clouzot. BB plays a beatnik girl on trial for murder, but what made her do it and can a patriarchal justice system treat her fairly? I suspect this felt dated when it appeared in nouvelle vague-era Paris, but it seems pretty relevant now.

Full review here

Salesman

Extraordinary documentary about a group of travelling salesman doing their damnedest to flog absurdly overpriced Bibles to low income Catholics in a late 1960s US where the Age of Aquarius most definitely isn’t in effect.

Full review here

And DYB’s films of:

2016

2015

2014

2013

2012

2011

[fayewonglibrary]

Hong Kong stars steal show (1999)

by special correspondent Monty DiPietro  

* excerpts *

Chinese box-office hit elevates Hong Kong’s cultural image

Perhaps, it should not have been a surprise at all. For years, Japanese have shown a keen interest in Asian languages as, in many ways, the image Japanese had of the rest of Asia continued its ever-quickening evolution - from boring to exotic and from backward to chic. Japan had begun to really look at its neighbours and liked what it saw. If enlightenment has an adversary it is the stereotype. For a long time, Hong Kong was regarded as little more than a cheap place to buy nice things.

Culturally, Hong Kong was widely considered a producer of low-budget kung fu films. But such impressions are now like old story lines, rejected and forgotten. It is difficult to determine exactly when or why the old stereotype died out.

The movie, Chungking Express, certainly helped elevate Hong Kong to the new cultural level of respect that it now enjoys in Japan. With its 1996 release under the Japanese title, Koi Suru Wakusei, or World in Love, the Wong Kar Wai film put a new face on Hong Kong pop culture. These days the film’s singer-actress Faye Wong is on the Japanese hit parade and plays sold-out concerts at the prestigious Budokan.

Tokyo film distribution company Prenom H is so confident of Wong Kar Wai’s appeal in the Japanese market that it pre-bought his most recent release, Happy Together. Retitled Buenos Aires in Japan, this gay love story set in Argentina was a massive silver-screen and video hit.

Meanwhile, the enthusiasm has enveloped other Hong Kong cultural exports. Fruit Chan’s Made in Hong Kong is one of this year’s most anticipated film releases.

In May, Japan’s biggest listings magazine, Pia, ran a seven-page spread that featured photos and biographies of the likes of Leslie Cheung, Tony Leung, Jordan Chan and 11 other new-generation Asian superstars. As far as the youth-driven Japanese consumer market is concerned, Hong Kong has definitely been discovered, and it is very cool. Japan is a country where trends catch on fast, and right now at least, it appears that anything Hong Kong creates a stir. The only losers in the game are those players who have not kept up with the changes in consumer preferences.

“Kung fu movies are basically dead in Japan, ” says film critic Sozo Teruoka. “Nowadays, kung fu movie fans make up a very small section of the market. Instead of patronising a cinema, they prefer to watch a kung fu video.”

Local characters on silver screen attract movie-goers

Even as interest in serious Hong Kong cinema is growing in the Japanese market, there remain some actors so popular as to be exempt from trends. The premier example is Hong Kong’s best-known cultural export - martial arts master, stuntman extraordinaire, and just-plain-loveable Jackie Chan. All of Jackie Chan’s releases are well received in Japan. There is a full-colour magazine to keep more than 3,000 dedicated Japanese members of his international fan club informed of the superstar’s activities. Fans are already awaiting Chan’s new film, Gorgeous, with great anticipation. One reason is that Tony Leung, the handsome star of Happy Together is appearing together with Chan. Although Chan is far and away the bigger draw, there will be more than a few young people buying tickets to see Leung, who is incredibly popular with Japanese audiences. His inclusion in the cast of Gorgeous ensures that the film will have the widest possible appeal in Japan.

A lesson learned from African-American actor Chris Tucker’s welcome appearance in Chan’s Rush Hour, which grossed more than US$100 million at the box office, is that a little local colour can go a long way towards attracting audiences to a new movie. Japanese actresses Takako Tokiwa and Hikari Ishida are co-starring in new Hong Kong films, and their roles will certainly increase interest among Japanese movie-goers.

Another Hong Kong artiste whose popularity in Japan is skyrocketing is Faye Wong. Like Leung, Wong also got much of her initial Japanese exposure from the film Chungking Express. Toshiba EMI reports sales of more than 100,000 units for the Beijing-born singer’s new album, Chang You, which features the hit, Eyes on Me.“ As far as Tokyo radio station J-Wave can recall, Wong is the only Canto-pop singer to have made it onto its playlist. And like her contemporaries in Hong Kong cinema, she owes much of her popularity to a mature, sophisticated image. "I was attending the launch of a record company’s new album a while back, and after this J-Pop girl did her thing, Faye Wong was brought into the room,” recalls Billboard magazine’s Tokyo bureau chief Steve McClure. “She didn’t smile insipidly like all the other female idol-types do. She had real charisma. And that is what makes Faye Wong different and interesting.” Not to mention a great voice and a beautiful face.

Wong got a big break early this year when she was chosen to sing the theme song for Final Fantasy VIII, the latest release in a series that is one of Japan’s most popular role-playing video games. Naturally, the game was hyped on Japanese television, and Faye Wong became a familiar face. A promotional tie-in that places an artiste’s material in a TV commercial results in nation-wide exposure. This is one of the best ways to establish a musical act in Japan.

Foreign chains import CDs to cater to urban customers The Eyes on Me single also benefited from cross-marketing - it was sold in computer game stores as well as record shops. EMI Hong Kong should be doing rather nicely selling copies of Chang You in Japan, but it is not. The reason?

Eyes on Me appears on the made-in-Japan version of the album but not on the Hong Kong import.

The Japanese CD market is uniquely Japanese. There is a funny little thing called the Retail Price Maintenance System that covers sound recordings, books, and newspapers. It enjoys a special exemption from the government’s anti-monopoly act, and ensures that a Japanese-made CD priced at 3,059 (HK$190) in Hokkaido will also sell for the same price in Tokyo and everywhere else in the country.

However, when a Japanese record label licenses a product from an overseas company, it cannot buy exclusive Japanese distribution rights and block all imports because that would violate international trade agreements. So, most Japanese record companies have established divisions to handle parallel importing. Imported CDs are not affected by the retail price-fixing system; they can be sold for at least 30% less than the price tag of a Japanese release. One might guess that the moment imported CDs hit the stores, customers would scoop them up and leave the pricey Japanese versions sitting in the racks. Wrong!

“Japanese like to have things explained to them,” says Toshiba EMI’s Hiroto Hizume, “but imported CDs do not include Japanese-language liner notes or translations of the lyrics.” Another reason Japanese pay a premium for locally-manufactured CDs is that most of Japan’s 7,000 CD shops do not bother to give their customers any choice - they simply do not stock imported versions. In recent years, foreign chains such as Tower Records and Virgin Megastore have broken the protectionist compact by offering imports in major urban centres.

Songs in English appeal to large Japanese following

The Japanese Retail Price Maintenance System is currently being phased out, and should be gone, officially at least, by 2002. But the fact that a domestic CD manufacturing industry survived for so long even when the prices of imports were lower underscores the difficulties foreign companies often have in penetrating the Japanese market. Kelly Chen and Shirley Kwan do not benefit from commercial tie-ins that put their music all over Japanese television and radio. Instead, their CDs languish in the “World” music sections of those stores that do carry imports. And despite the steadily increasing interest in Asian pop culture, the general international section of a CD shop is still the first stop for Japanese music fans searching for new releases from overseas. The only CDs that are placed in the general international section are those which feature English numbers. Hong Kong pop releases share shelf space with Turkish folk songs in the “World” section.

Although she has the voice of an angel, Faye Wong had to render English-language songs before her Japanese fans would listen. Toshiba’s Hizume explains that Japanese consumers are simply more accustomed to hearing English than Cantonese. Wong is expected to record another English track for her next album, which Toshiba EMI says is due out sometime later this year.

An approach that has helped several Asian artistes make their foray into Japan is to sing in Japanese. Maybe, the time has come for another Teresa Teng, the late Taiwanese singer who charmed her way into Japanese hearts during the 1970s. Radio, cable and satellite music video programmes are another avenue for foreign singers and bands to get exposure in Japan, but there is a Catch-22. Artistes will not get on radio or TV unless they are popular, and cannot become popular until they get on radio or TV. Booking a promotional tour is an expensive option unless a record company is underwriting the act. This only happens if it has a fan base and when its product is available in stores. By comparison, bringing a film to Japan is fairly straightforward. Like almost everyone in the industry, Cine City Hong Kong’s Yuko Yoshinaga says producers should approach the film festivals first. Established in 1991, Cine City Hong Kong is located in an airy, two-storey building in Tokyo’s very fashionable Aoyama district. Along with a wide selection of movie books and posters, the company also sells video tapes, DVDs and other cinema-related products. Cine City Hong Kong is affiliated with Prenom H, the distribution company that funded the Japanese rights to Wong Kar Wai’s Happy Together. Yoshinaga says major Japanese film festivals, most of which are held annually, are invaluable vehicles for introducing new Hong Kong films and establishing contacts with the dozens of distribution companies that can put a movie in cinemas, video shops or on television.

------------------------------------------------------------------

SOURCE: THE JAPAN TIMES

[recentanimenews]

Review: Your Name (Kimi no Na wa)

Body-swapping protagonists Taki and Mitsuha bicker by writing "idiot" on each other's faces.

Your Name (Kimi no Na wa in Japan) is the biggest hit anime in years, landing just behind Disney's Frozen in the ranking of highest-grossing films in Japan. It's not hard to see why the movie has brought such massive audiences to the cinemas. Director Makoto Shinkai (5 Centimeters Per Second, Voices of a Distant Star, The Garden of Words) has a knack for incredible set design and intimate portrayals of human emotion, and he brings all of this to bear while shaving off some of the idiosyncrasies of his previous indie work. For newcomers to the director, Your Name is no doubt a spectacular, revelatory experience. For some of us who have seen what he is capable of, the movie can feel paradoxically both unfocused and overly simplistic.

In a sense, Your Name is a typical Shinkai movie, but in reverse. The leads — bored country girl Mitsuha and city boy Taki — begin the story physically separated, but soon find that they inhabit each other's bodies during their dreams. What starts as a curious supernatural phenomenon soon turns into a stressful tug-of-war between the teenagers, as each tries to prevent the other from inadvertently ruining their life. But it's the second and third acts of Your Name that transform it from a quirky supernatural comedy to something more profound. The romance that develops between Mitsuha and Taki hits a snag, and they must overcome both a horrific catastrophe and time itself in order to close the gap between them, all while trying to hold onto memories of each other that seem to slip from their fingers like half-remembered dreams.

Your Name is brimming with unique, interesting ideas, especially considering how often Shinkai's prior films rehash the same old story about star-crossed lovers. There's body-swapping, spirituality, mortal danger, an exploration of gender identity, and a lot of quite funny character-based comedy (the kids coming to terms with their new body parts is especially charming).

But Shinkai is a creature of habit, and Your Name suffers when he falls back into patterns from his prior films. Characters retread lines almost literally ("I'll search for you no matter where you go" or something to that effect), while Shinkai's shot composition and background design similarly cribs from specific scenes in 5 Centimeters Per Second and Children Who Chase Lost Voices. The final sequence itself is a near shot-for-shot retread of another Shinkai film (I won't spoil which), but with a far less nuanced ending. The worst is the director's penchant for music video-style montage sequences. Your Name features no fewer than three of them, including an incongruous TV anime-esque opening song, and they often feel like a crutch for when Shinkai (also the writer of Your Name) can't figure out how to move his characters into place for the next scene. In his previous films these sequences provided punchy emotional climaxes, however schmaltzy they sometimes were. In Your Name this tendency becomes distracting and serves only to confuse the story's pacing.

On top of this, Your Name's three acts feature such radically different conflicts that the movie sometimes feels disjointed. Children Who Chase Lost Voices suffered a similar problem of being overburdened with too many different ideas, while 5 Centimeters Per Second avoids the problem entirely by simply presenting three separate short films. In Your Name there's a binding thread between the three acts, but the momentum isn't strong enough; I found it hard to stay totally invested all the way through. I was surprised to hear how many attendees at my screening were moved to tears by the end of the movie. Despite 5 Centimeters Per Second routinely reducing me to a blubbering mess, my eyes remained completely dry for the duration of Your Name.

Shinkai has admitted that Your Name is inspired in part by the 3/11 earthquake and tsunami, and the latter half of the story spends a lot of time exploring Japan's post-3/11 anxiety about natural disasters, the death of small towns, and the loss of traditional culture to urbanization. This commentary on contemporary Japanese society is easily the film's most interesting theme (and clearly has been quite powerful for Japanese audiences), but foreign audiences may lose track of it under the weight of body-swap antics and Shinkai's dogged focus on romance between the teenage leads. What's left by the end is a love story that is sweet but surprisingly shallow, considering the many promising avenues it takes to get there.

Still, those Shinkai visuals never cease to amaze. He is rightly renowned for his vibrant, hyperreal color design and intricately researched locations, both of which are present in Your Name, but the new addition this time is in the realm of character design and animation. Veteran character designers and animation directors Masayoshi Tanaka (Anohana, Toradora) and Masashi Ando (Princess Mononoke, Paprika, A Letter to Momo) create expressive modern anime designs that burst with life when set in motion. The first act in particular explores a series of hilarious juxtapositions of Mitsuha and Taki's feminine and masculine tendencies, using their body language in many cases to accentuate the comedy. Shinkai's previous work features fairly flat character designs that rarely move in particularly inventive ways, which arguably grants even more of a spotlight to his evocative background work. In Your Name, the characters take center stage, sometimes overshadowing the backgrounds and provoking a nagging sense that something of the director's delicate, introspective magic has been lost in the shuffle. On the bright side, the move toward animation also results in a fascinating (and positively un-Shinkai!) montage that eschews hyperrealism for surrealism via pencil animation and psychedelic color work.

All that is to say that Your Name is not a bad film by any measure. It's a beautiful, ambitious piece of animation housing a supernatural adventure with a lot of heart, but a lack of thematic focus. For any other director this would be a career-defining triumph. For Makoto Shinkai it's merely his major-label debut: a little too cloying and commercialized, but a massive hit and a suitable gateway to the indie work that forms its foundation.

Your Name (Kimi no Na wa) originally appeared on Ani-Gamers on April 17, 2017 at 5:00 PM.

By: Evan Minto

[triananero]

7, 8, 11, 17, 24, 29, 32, 39, 40 for 'talk about' if you don't mind and that's not too much

7: Talk about your biggest insecurity.

Hahaha where do I start. Well, considering that the finals are coming, I guess naming my intelligence would be about time. I’m an A-student, and many people actually consider me really smart, but tbh I don’t feel that way and I’m really insecure about how I’m going to pass my finals (which is, like, a HUGE deal in Russia, far bigger than you can imagine). I used to be pretty certain of my abilities, but facing the exams I’m not. So I really just want it to be over already.

8: Talk about the thing you are most proud of.

That is probably going to sound incredibly stupid but… The first thing to come to my mind was the impact I had on the Russian Haikyuu!! fandom. I’m kind of its administrator, cause the majority of the fandom hangs out in one place, which is really convenient, and in 2.5 years that I have been working with them I’ve done quite many things for them and, welp, earned their love, you could even say that. I try my best to help them purchase official goods from time to time to support the creators, too, and sometimes buy some on my own money to give as presents for quizzes and stuff like that. And Russian HQ fans are these kind of people whom you want to give to, who make you actually feel appreciated, which is incredibly nice. We even have meet-ups when I go to other cities in Russia! So guwaah it’s incredibly cool.

11: Talk about the best dream you’ve ever had.

OKAY that is also a difficult one, I had a few dreams that I’ve really enjoyed, but one sprung to my mind instantly, so let’s just roll with it. The dream was kinda short, I don’t even remember that much, but basically Hinata was sick at first, and I think Kageyama was worried about him, and then, for some unknown reason, Hinata was stabbed, twice (once in the abdomen, and once in his back), and yup he was dying. It was snowing when I woke up, and I remember feeling so… immensely good? As if I have the healthiest body, positive thoughts. My choushi was just really good after that dream. 

Yes, angst is my life force.

Last night I dreamt of sad and desperate Kageyama (thanks go to @nimbus-cloud for her recent Haisute reports), and that felt really good too (hmm, it was actually also winter in my dream. Interesting. Oh, and also I really enjoyed the one where Kimura Tatsunari (stage play Kageyama) was for some reason in my apartment lol. I spoke Japanese, and I was actually amazed just how decent I acted as a fan when I woke up lol.

17: Talk about someone you want to be friends with.

Oh. To be honest, there’s one person that I guess I’m friends with, but we haven’t been in touch properly for so long that it’s really frustrating, and I don’t know what to think. They’re incredible, gorgeous, funny, and just the epitome of sunshine, in anyone’s life, and we used to chat and Skype lots, even met a few times (we’re from different countries of course). It’s not the same now, and it makes me feel really miserable sometimes.

24: Talk about something someone told you that meant a lot.

I don’t think I can remember any incredibly meaningful things that have changed my life somehow, but I can tell you that Furudate Haruichi told me many important things in Haikyuu!!. It changed my outlook in a way, changed my hobbies, but mostly my attitude (cue Oikawa Tooru). That is something I am really grateful for.

29: Talk about what turns you on.

Angst, hurt/comfort, fictional injuries, well-written character death, amazing soundtracks, cute girls, some cute boys (in that particular order).

32: Talk about a place you remember from your childhood.

I still live where I spent my childhood, unfortunately, and as for a place… You know, I just remembered a cave in my children’s garden. We had this cave in the big room, which a bridge and some other shit, and there were cushions inside, it was pretty dark and kinda cool, especially for a 4-year-old me. And what I don’t actually remember, but my friend apparently does, is that I used to sit in that cave with a few other children and read out loud for them, cause I was the earliest to learn how to lol.

39: Talk about things you wish you’d known earlier.

That starting your exam preparations in advance actually helps a lot. That Haikyuu!! existed. That I could’ve started working earlier a freelance translator. That some people whom you pour your soul into might just disappear.

40: Talk about the end of something in your life.  

School would be the obvious answer. It’s ending pretty soon, and I’m mostly happy with that, I really want to move on. Also I can’t wait for the period of my life when I’m still living with my parents to end, cause I seriously need a breather. Like, a few years long breather. The end I can’t even clearly imagine is the end of Haikyuu!!, cause just n o. As much as I understand that a well timed ending is necessary, and I do want it to happen, I just can’t imagine it, haha.

Thank you very much for your questions, it was lots of fun!