It is time for the monthly post!  Man, when did this thing start becoming monthly lmao.  Was originally gonna post more than this but life is quite busy and it ended up being a monthly thing.  Well anyway, this month has been extremely busy for me and I’d figure I’d spend this post just briefly talking about random thing that I wanted to talk about.

Spring

To start things off on a not so great note, spring’s basically here, and this is my least favorite time of year.  The weather is rainy, it’s getting hotter out, the pollen’s coming out and making me sneeze like hell, the bugs are starting to come out, and this is just in general a really busy time of year for me.  There’s some good things like the sakura trees are starting to bloom, but in general, I hate this time of year, bring back the winter.

Isshuukan Friends

Well, now that I got that complaint out, let’s move on to Isshuukan Friends.  Started watching this anime this week and already got up to ep 6.  I’ve really been enjoying it.  It’s less of a comedy and more of a drama than I originally expected, but it’s the kind of drama I can enjoy.  It’s not the love triangle type drama or those kdramas or anything like that, it’s a nice story focused anime about a girl who forgets everything about her friend every week.  The story is fairly simple, but enjoyable, and the pacing is done really well so that it doesn’t feel rushed and doesn’t drag.  The art style gives a really nostalgic vibe and I feel really relaxed while watching.  The interactions are really wholesome, and I find myself smiling a lot while watching it.  The OP and ED are also really good, especially the ED which is a cover of Kanade, love that song.

So far based on the first 6 episodes, I definitely recommend it.

Sword of Sand and Mabui

About a month ago I found this really really really obscure manga in my local library which consists of 2 manga by Higa Susumu, Sword of Sand and Mabui.  This manga particularly caught my interest because it was about the perspective of Okinawan civilians during the Battle of Okinawa and Mabui is about the American military bases on the island after WWII.

The pacific theater of WWII always interested me the most because on my dad’s side, my great grandfather was a medic in the army-air force in the pacific and served in many of the battles there, and on my mom’s side, my great grandparents were suffering on Taiwan which was under the rule of Imperial Japan at the time.  My grandfather who was also in the army was also part of many military training exercises at Okinawa when he was in service before I was born.  On top of these personal connections, the pacific theater is something that’s always just captured my interest, if you’ve never seen the show The Pacific (along with Band of Brothers and Masters of the Air), I highly recommend watching it.

Anyway, when I first picked it up and started reading, I thought cool, this manga really captures the perspective of the Okinawan civilians.  It really was cruel what happened to these innocent people, over 100k Okinawan civilians would die during the battle.  As I kept reading though, I realized these stories were actually based on real experiences of people who lived through the battle.  Sword of Sand was written in the 90s and Higa-sensei was born in 1953, so he knew a lot of people who lived through it, including his parents.  Each chapter of both Sword of Sand and Mabui is based on the stories of people he spoke to.  He wrote a chapter for his mother and father each too.  This really sold this manga to me even further because these characters in the manga were real people who experienced these horrors.  It really saddens me so much how destructive and violent humans can be to one another.  If you ever get the chance to, I highly highly recommend reading these 2 manga.  I’m not sure if there’s anywhere to read it online or anything since I was lucky enough to find the book in my local library, but if anyone does find somewhere to read it, I highly recommend reading it.

Spring 2025

Alright, next up is Spring 2025, which is starting in like a week.  Man, can’t believe a quarter of the year has gone by already, and there’s only 1 episode left of 100gfs s2, hope s3 gets announced right afterwards.  Will have to make a post about 100gfs at some point too.  Anyway, this season is really bare for me.  Probably the lightest season in years for me, there’s only 3 anime I’m planning on watching currently: Aharen s2, Takamine-san, and Gundam GQuuuuuuX.  Looking forward to them all, Aharen s1 was great, Takamine-san looks really good and the manga’s been on my planning for ages, and Gundam GQuuuuuuX has a lot of the eva staff which should be interesting.  I might add more anime to my planning when Gigguk does his trailer watching stream and stuff, but just in general, this is a really light season.

Music

Came across a few bands recently(ish) that I’d like to point out.  One is The Blue Hearts which is a really good Punk-Rock band, and a pretty famous one at that.  They didn’t exist for that long and broke up way before youtube became a thing, so I’ll probably see if I can get a CD or something, but they got some good songs, especially Linda Linda, that’s a good one.  Apparently there’s also a movie based on it, kinda like the Chiisana Koi no Uta movie I guess, will have to watch it at some point.

Another one is this guy Kazuyoshi Saito, idk what the name of the band is in these vids since google says he was in multiple bands and I’m too lazy right now to dig around, but he’s got some good music.  As you can tell from the playing style, the guitars, and especially those hair cuts lmao, massive massive beatles influence lmao.  Definitely good music though.

One more band I want to point out is this death metal band “Hatebeak”.  I’m not really into death metal at all, but I had to point this band out because it’s hilarious lmao.  This band’s lead singer is a parrot named Waldo lmao.  They literally have a bird as the lead singer for their death metal band, man, you gotta love the internet for letting us discover such crazy things lmao.

Hinagiku Frames

Dw, I’m still working on them.  Ik it’s been a while, but back in december I think it was, I was actually getting really close to finishing the ep 4 video when all my stuff got corrupted and lost so I had to restart from scratch.  It was very disappointing, but I wasn’t discouraged and have been working towards getting them all back and redoing it, and this type I have everything saved in multiple places just in case, learned my lesson lmao.  It’s still gonna take a while because life doesn’t allow me to have the free time to work on the Hina frames as much as I’d like to, but it’ll be out eventually, I still am working on it.  This project was expected to take many years anyway, so this little detour is nothing, like frieren taking a pit stop at a town to clean a statue to Himmel.  Which speaking of, looking forward to Frieren s2 in 2026!  But yeah, still working on the frames and it’s coming alone nicely.

 

Alright, I think that’s enough yapping for this month, it’s 1 am on a monday night/tuesday morning, and I should probably sleep since I gotta get up early.  Bye