• In the new project, we’ve reached the “Protagonist Realizes She’s Kind of a Jerk, Decides to Try to Be Nicer Despite Not Knowing How” point around 48,000 words. Healers 1 reaches that point at around 60k. This might seem like progress, but the fact that this book has this sort of moment in the first place continues the frustrating realization that I Cannot Be Normal.
• We’re fully in the summer 2024 anime season. Kind of a thin one in this house, so it’s half backlog.
  • Suicide Squad Isekai. Still pales in comparison to Harley Quinn, and I don’t care one bit about the otherworld, but it’s fine so far.
  • Senpai is an Otokonoko. Kiddo, you are in love with your childhood friend, and the longer this series drags that out, the shorter my patience is going to get. But it’s cute.
  • Makeine: Too Many Losing Heroines! Like the meme says: I love mess. I truly do. Only one episode in, and I wonder if this will end up being my favorite this season.
  • Spice and Wolf continues. Coincidentally, I started listening to the audiobook recently, as a toe-dip into audiobooks overall. It’s fine, enjoying it quite a bit, but this makes three iterations of an identical story in a row for me (since we watched the first anime adaptation just before the reboot started). Had to stop for now.
  • Backlist: Tearmoon Empire. It’s on the verge of losing my interest about halfway through. It’s not bad, it just isn’t grabbing me.
  • Backlist: Natsume’s Book of Friends continues. It fell out of our “last show of the evening” slot when it started getting more intense, so it’s been slower going lately.
  • Backlist: Komi Can’t Communicate. OK, so the first episode of this show had me in tears, and predictably, I am here for Golden Retriever Nonbinary Goofball. But out of the other side characters, one is a complete void, one is grating, and one is so odious that I consider noping out every time she appears. (Oh goody, two of my absolute least favorite tropes, the Predatory Lesbian and the Yandere. Great. Hilarious.) And I have mixed feelings about Komi herself and how she functions more as a projection screen for the other characters than a person in her own right, which is so frustrating. I wonder if some of her interiority is lost because Netflix is doing a terrible job translating all the onscreen text. It seemed like she was, you know, a person at first, but now she’s more of a moe object that gets dragged around and fawned over.
  • Since my last delve into All of This Stuff, we started and finished Tomo-chan is a Girl!, which was delightful. The premise-joke wore thin sometimes, but beyond that was a cast of sweet dumbasses and secret schemers. Good times.

Anyway. I was reminded in a writing discussion recently that admitting you’re a weeb will drive people away from your fiction, something something cringe something something. Thanks, I’ll put it on the list of advice I’m ignoring.