wow, i barely touch this thing these days

For better or worse, I haven’t felt any super pressing need to update my blog in a very long time with anything of particular significance. I do still regularly update the Anime Connection page, though.

I’ve been finally following through on my desire to learn Japanese, albeit slowly and lopsidedly. I sprained my ankle back in April, so I was also healing up from that for a while. I should be back at 100% pretty soon, but that was an ordeal. I also started a new job recently, a local one, part time but in an industry I like a lot more than healthcare, so I’m hoping it turns into something full time down the line. Prior to that, I was just sitting at home, reading and playing mobile games, slowly watching my bank account empty…

On the entertainment front, how about Endgame, huh? I do want to watch it again, but since I don’t have any local friends anymore (they all moved away!), plus being occupied with the new job, I haven’t gotten around to it yet. What else… a preview for Westworld 3 dropped like a week ago! It looks pretty intriguing, very different from the first two seasons, which is honestly both welcome and exciting. Can’t wait!

Nothing too interesting going on in the anime/LN world, at least not that I can think of off the top of my head. Kimetsu no Yaiba is the best anime I’m watching this season, Kono Oto Tomare! is good too but some of the production values and director decisions are a bit subpar (a series about playing koto music, choosing not to have that much koto music in the soundtrack? what?). The light novel 86 -eighty six- is being translated by Yen Press and is probably my current biggest newer-license recommendation out there. J-Novel Club picked up Ascendance of a Bookworm too, which is getting an anime this year, also a high-quality read.

Anyway, I doubt I’ll be writing a lot of blog posts, but I do plan to keep updating the connection database and posting stuff here and there. Thanks for keeping up!

status update: april 2018

It’s been a while since I posted, so figured I’d write something up!

I kinda burned myself out on Monster Hunter World, so that’s been kind of set to the side while I wait for new content to come out and/or more friends to get the game. In the meantime, I’ve been doing a lot of LN/WN reading, and the new anime season just started last week.

Hinamatsuri is my pick for this season so far. Isekai Izayaka “Nobu” is also great, it’s a 10-minute short followed by some real life sequences, which is pretty nice since I can pick up some cooking tips :P Golden Kamui would have been amazing if it didn’t have such outrageously bad CGI. Maybe the second episode will be better, but as is it’s merely watchable. I’m actually quite taken by Uma Musume; it could have been just another cute girls/idol anime, but the production values are quite good, they really downplay the idol stuff right now, and overall it just seems like they tried to put together a really interesting anime rather than just capitalize on the market trends.

Life’s been whatever. I work from home, so I kind of feel like every day is the same since I barely interact with any other people face-to-face. I’m looking into picking up martial arts again; I kind of tried a few times to find a place over the last few years, but nothing ever really looked promising to me. We’ll see how this time goes! My book collection is starting to really get out of hand, since I’m running out of shelf space and just building stacks on the floor, haha.

Still playing Fate/GO, just finished the Da Vinci event (picked up a NP2 Jeanne Alter), now we have a few days “off” until the Fate/Zero Accel collab event begins. I do like redoing these events in English, it feels like I get a lot more since I can both understand the story and also apply my previous knowledge to optimize getting through the events and picking up items I need and stuff. Looking forward to the summer and Prisma Ilya events coming later this year!

In other media, I’m super pumped for Avengers and Westworld coming really soon! I’ll want to do another Westworld rewatch, but not sure if I can manage it since…

This is still in early stages, but I started doing some actual translation! It’s a Japanese web novel with almost 200 chapters out, I’m hoping to get somewhere between 50-100 done before I post anything. It’s been a lot of fun so far. I’m still relying quite heavily on the combination of Google Translate, Jisho, and Thesaurus.com, but there are a lot of words I’m starting to recognize now, and this is also improving my writing skills as I find ways to express things that don’t translate directly into English very well.

I did 4 chapters in about a week, but one of them was super short. I’m hoping to get through 5 chapters a week once I get used to it, pending other events like Dominaria prerelease and relatives visiting, but that means I might have stuff to post in a few months.

Thanks for reading!

end of 2017 update

Traveled for Christmas, came back and got even more presents! @animetoday @yenpress @Vertical_Comics @KodanshaUSA pic.twitter.com/UC4Hj71oSy

— Myskaros – JNC Project Manager (@myskaros) December 29, 2017

Been a long time since my last post. Here’s what happened in the last couple months:

* Grinded hard in both Fate/GO JP and NA for various events
* Watched lots of anime
* Played a little Ixalan
* Read a bunch of books (Oathbringer, The Name of the Wind, lots of light novels)
* Watched all of Stranger Things 2 and Punisher (both great, highly recommend them)
* Hung out at GP Portland to get some Planechase cards signed
* Had my car broken into during dinner, backpack stolen, which included all my Planechase cards, all my Ixalan prize packs from prerelease, my trade binder, my GP Minneapolis Zendikar deck box and sleeves by rk post, various other things
* Replaced my car window
* Interviewed for a new project in Nashville and got it
* Prepped for and went on site to Nashville for 2 weeks
* Geeked out over new Monster Hunter World stuff, played the open beta a bit
* Went to San Francisco for Christmas to meet my new niece!
* Got back yesterday night, picked up some fun packages that I Tweeted about above

Now, what’s coming up next?

* Going to a cabin for New Year’s to hang out with friends, play board games, hike and stuff
* Going back to Nashville in January for a week
* Picking up Monster Hunter World on January 26th and isolating myself from society for an amount of time
* Reading all the light novels and manga
* Pining over lack of Brandon Sanderson books
* Pretending I’m going to pick back up my web writing but not actually doing it
* Pretending I’m going to try to seriously learn Japanese again but remaining at casual/glacial pace

Hope everyone out there had/has a good holiday season! Here’s to hoping 2018 is a less shitty year than 2017 was!

So yeah, I’ve been kind of slacking off on my self-inflicted blog responsibilities. I have excuses though! So many excuses!

• I decided to read Dungeon Defense and ended up passing 2 days without really doing anything other than reading Dungeon Defense. Eagerly awaiting book 5.
• Thor: Ragnarok came out, and I went to see it, and it was glorious.
• Stranger Things II also came out, and I got hooked and had to marathon it.
• J-Novel Club is having a catch-up month on The Faraway Paladin, which I had been wanting to read, then I started reading it and couldn’t stop.
• Fate/Grand Order (NA) just launched the GUDAGUDA Honnoji event last night and it’s awesome and hilarious.

This is genuinely why I feel like I can’t actually become a creator, I’m way too engrossed in consuming. It started when I was very young, I would read all the Bruce Coville kids books. My mom got me into renting Newbery Medal winner books at the library, which got me into the Chronicles of Prydain series, which set off my fantasy tendencies. In elementary school, I discovered Super Mario RPG, which led to a friend introducing me to Final Fantasy 3 (6 in Japan) and Chrono Trigger. In junior/senior high school, I got into Redwall and Dragonlance as well as Harry Potter, in addition to getting a Playstation and learning about SNES emulators. Some point in that mess, my cousins in Switzerland introduced me to the Dragon Ball and Shaman King mangas, which eventually, in college, led me to dabbling in anime, which led to reading manga online, and after I moved for my first job I started collecting English-language manga and light novels as well.

I just really like… stories. Human imagination taking an audience to a new place, based in the real world or not. I am especially fond of fantasy and sci-fi because it’s just amazing how people can come up with concepts that do not even exist! And, with sci-fi, it can even lead to people inventing stuff based on those ideas in the future! But the stories I like always maintain the human element, how people and civilization fit, or don’t fit, into these potential or possible worlds.

I have a bookmark folder dedicated to manga series and translated light novels/web novels that I want to read sometime. I have a ton of video games I’ve bought over the years that I know I’ll love, I just haven’t found time to play them yet. I have books I’ve bought that I know I’ll love but haven’t read them yet. WHY ARE THERE SO MANY THINGS!!!

happy indictment day!

So, I’m already falling behind on my writing project, because I’ve been following this indictment stuff, haha. Tomorrow (today?) I’ll be out for most of the day, hanging out in Beaverton, so I don’t know when exactly I’ll get the next part out. Anime Connections will be updated for sure, though.

Happy Halloween!

anime connection: 18 entries!

Just a short update to let y’all know that I have compiled information on 18 anime series with English light novel and/or manga releases! The two manga series currently there are One Punch Man (because I wanted to have at least one manga series as a template) and A Certain Scientific Railgun (I was doing Index, so I figured I might as well do them both), the rest are all light novels. This basically completes the light novels in my collection with anime (I own a few volumes of Baccano!, and Durarara!!, but I haven’t read them yet; Nisio Isin’s Monogatari is an Escher painting I don’t really want to dive into quite yet :V), so next I’ll either move to J-Novel Club series or the rest of my manga collection.

Anime Connection

black panther full trailer

I avoid trailers after the first few big ones and as the release date gets closer, and it sounds like I made a good choice from the negative feedback I’ve heard on the wind regarding the newest Last Jedi trailer :o but Black Panther is still like a number of months out and there’s only been the one teaser anyway, so this is good stuff!

monster hunter world releases in january!

From this year’s Tokyo Game Show, we’ve learned some new things about Monster Hunter World. The console worldwide release will be January 26, 2018, with PC to follow “shortly after.” The trailer has a ton of new monsters in it as well, including the new flagship, Nergigante, which will be on the Japanese cover (NA/EU will have Rathalos for brand reasons or something).

I’m still slowly working my way through Generations solo (damn you, Gozer!), about to break into HR, but super excited to get this on PS4 next year!

English site with info: http://www.monsterhunterworld.com/us/

now that i know wordpress embeds tweets, time to be lazy with my package posts

Came back from vacation with a few packages waiting for me. @yenpress @Vertical_Comics @gomanga pic.twitter.com/qUGR2bFLEp

— Myskaros – JNC Project Manager (@myskaros) July 6, 2017

Got back from Europe the other day and had a bunch of packages waiting for me! I already spent all day yesterday reading Overlord 4, which was great. Not too much to comment on regarding the new additions aside from Grimgar of Fantasy and Ash, which deserves mention for being a collaboration between J-Novel Club and Seven Seas Entertainment.

Just the other day I subscribed to J-Novel Club and read the first volume of “If It’s for My Daughter, I’d Even Defeat a Demon Lord,” which has a manga adaptation that’s absolutely adorable. Looking forward to spending more time perusing their library. However, I’ve already discovered a major disappointment, which is that any novels they have released as e-books are no longer available to read for members. This is “offset” by the premium membership, which costs over twice as much but only gives you a credit to buy 1 book per month.

To further add injury, though, they claim that the premium credit gives you a premium version of the e-book that cannot be purchased normally. At least you can buy premium credits à la carte, so someone who consumes as much content as I do isn’t bottlenecked by the monthly credit, but the credits cost less with the premium membership too… maybe I sound a bit entitled, but I feel like this is a somewhat exploitative program for people like me who just want to read a lot of stuff. It’s like going to the library and discovering a new series to read, but for them to only have books 3 and up :/

makoto best girl

I’ve been rather disinclined to update the blog in the last 2 months; we had a few hospitals go live 4 weeks ago, so work was super busy lately, and in the weeks before that I was spending most of it on Persona 5. I completed the story for the first time last weekend when I had a short break at home from work, so now I’m going to work on a 100% Confidants/trophies clear. I also played through the game with the English dub the first time, so now I’m listening to the Japanese dub.

So I’ve played Persona 3, 4, and now 5 (well, also Persona 4 Arena, but that doesn’t count), and each one has been so much better than the last. Which is not to say 3 was in any way poor or mediocre, it was also amazing, it just speaks to the overall quality of the series that they keep getting better.

Hmm, what else is new? I recently discovered a YouTube anime/video game cover artist named AmaLee who has some very impressive work, I highly encourage you to check her stuff out! Here is her channel. I am particularly enamored with the ERASED OP&ED mix, as well as Aldnoah.Zero’s Heavenly Blue and “Heavenly Lies” mashup of aLIEz and Heavenly Blue.

I am thinking about trying to get into writing a bit, maybe short stories as worldbuilding kind of thing. I have a few ideas for a fantasy world I might want to write about, but I have no structure or background in writing, so I think I will just find some time to do what I can and see where it leads.

Last, the anime I’m enjoying the most this season is definite Re:Creators. Definitely Sawano Hiroyuki’s music is a huge factor, as I love his stuff, but the show itself is just genuinely well crafted with interesting characters and story, and it even gets into some fascinating discussions of philosophy. Boku no Hero Academia is always a great time, and other than that Sakura Quest is a neat show that seems to mash up elements from Hanasaku Iroha and Shirobako. All shows I highly recommend!