What I'm putting in my face recently
I am pouring media into my face. Here are some brief thoughts on some of what I've watched since the start of the year:
- Megalo Box (2018) - Pretty decent boxing anime! Good relationship between the protagonist/antagonist, though I reckon they could have gone about 10% harder into the body horror and made the show 30% better by doing so.
- Wonder Man (2026) - Minimal but non-zero amounts of capeshit. I was here for Ben Kingsley and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, who I hadn't seen in anything but had heard good things about. Unfortunately, I think the latter is a bit wasted in the show, mostly serving as a foil for Kingsley to chew the scenery. He's great, as always. Perhaps a second season will give Abdul-Mateen more to work with.
- Ghost in the Shell: S.A.C. 2nd GiG (2004) - Rewatch of a classic, it's about a nationalist Japanese leader using refugees to stoke division so unfortunately it has no relevance to the modern-day state of things. Now to take a BIIIIIIG sip of water--
- Revolutionary Girl Utena (1997) - Feels stupid to have waited this long to watch it. As good as everyone says it is and better. I went in having seen none of it besides some screencaps and gifs over the years, so I was surprised at how funny it is! Currently on season 2.
- Oshi no Ko (2023) - When this show is good, it is fucking fantastic, and when it's not that, it's generally great anyway. Season 2 is awesome, season 3 didn't quite hit those highs for me but I'm still very excited for the final one, whenever it comes.
- Invincible (2021) - As of the current season, I am hate-watching this show. It genuinely unironically insists on itself, constantly lampshading its terrible animation and visuals and pacing. It assumes the viewer will be invested in the show no matter what happens on screen and if that viewer investment even exists it abuses the hell out of it. There are talented people working on this who are clearly being crunched to the point of exhaustion. Good voice performances from a committed cast. If you are considering starting to watch, please do anything else with your time.
- Frieren: Beyond Journey's End (2023) - Slowly working my way through this. It's pretty good, but I think the short episode length works against it. The runtime doesn't give it enough time to breathe - or rather, it correctly takes that time to breathe, but at the cost of reducing how much plot it can run through per episode, making it feel quite slow at times.
- The Boys (2019) - Final season, I think it's about time for it to finish up. I will always go to bat for Karl Urban - he was great in Almost Human, a show nobody has watched - but I'm looking forward to him picking up some different roles. This show has some high highs and some low lows, and the central relationship between Hughie and Annie got completely fucked up by some turd-tier storytelling last season. It's gauche to talk about people's plastic surgeries, but a lead character's huge amount of work has both drastically shifted her look and noticeably affected her performance - she now struggles to enunciate because her face is so stiff. It's hard to watch and sad to see. Body dysmorphia is a fuck, and so are predatory plastic surgeons!
In the middle of all this I've been playing Umamusume: Pretty Derby daily, puzzling out its systems. Great for when Invincible is on the TV in front of me, begging me to ignore it. I'm always curious to see what a game with infinite money does with its budget - my vibe on it right now is that it's interestingly put together and I don't know a lot of other gigantic mainstream games that use storylets as heavily as it does. But maybe I'm just not playing enough gachas, lol. (I will not be downloading any more.) (My favourite horses are Tamamo Cross and Nice Nature.)
Also: the Deadlock closed alpha (beta?) has consumed a lot of my time. I swore I'd never get into another moba after I put nearly 4000 hours into Dota 2, but Deadlock feels both fresh and familiar in cool ways. The characters have some potent shit going on, the combat feels great, and I am obsessed with one specific little sleepy guy. The Street Brawl mode means I don't get locked into a losing game for 40 minutes - it's very smartly put together.
Finally: I am still actively raiding in FFXIV, we've (mostly) blind progged up to M12S phase 2. Dawntrail might still be my favourite expac to date, and I have vague plans to write on this at length later, but I think the amount of genuine respect and care that's gone into the worldbuilding has been overlooked to a ridiculous degree. The effort is invisible if you don't look for it, but it's very much there. Tural is, by a very long shot, the most thoughtfully put-together setting in the game. Shame that so many new players have a bunch of unbearably boring dorks screaming in their ears about how much it sucks. Don't @ me if you disagree with me on this one, I do not care! Wuk Lamat is my best friend and it is a crying shame that she seems to have died on the way back to her home planet.