I love how Naruto’s thoughts about what Renge gave him this past year was fan service.

My extension just updated and things seem to be working again thankfully.

I hadn’t heard of this series before, and thought it would be a silly premise good for a volume or two. Looking it up, its been going for nearly a decade and is in its 20th volume. They are really milking this premise for all its worth.

There’s no such thing as monsters under the bed. It’s just Mary!

I am a couple chapters behind on this series. This is one of those that I somehow missed migrating after Comick shut down.

This series is absolutely wild. If you think you know what is going to happen next…you are wrong. The only constant is a constant drive for yuri. Lots of fun.

I just caught up on this show and I agree that the meat looked really, really good this week.

I have used this salt baking method once before to cook a large roast, and it works really well. In my case, we did it on an open fire, so the salt casing helps protect the meat from the variable temperatures of the open fire as flames/coals ebb and flow through the hours it takes to bake. The salt really does harden into a shell as it bakes thanks to mixing in the moisture (egg whites). This traps in the moisture from the meat as it cooks, essentially steaming it. It takes a lot of salt to do this well, so I imagine you would only see this in the traditional food of maritime locales where salt would have been readily available. The salt is not reusable afterwards.

In a restaurant setting, I would imagine they could achieve much of the same effect through commercial steam ovens. This lets them bake a roast while injecting steam into the oven, keeping it just as moist (and cooking it faster without having to heat the meat through the shell). They might wrap it in something else that helps keep the juices in while also allowing better heat conduction.

Translation:

Glad you liked the show!

It’s one of my favorites. I love me a good chuuni character and Rikka is one of the best out there. Rikka somehow is able to be an utterly ridiculous chuuni character while also having a really compelling and touching story that is exceedingly human and grounded in reality.

Yeah, I think was more of a setup chapter to introduce the new character. I think everybody has seen the ‘awful at cooking’ character before, so it doesn’t really feel too novel. I think her romance prediction powers are more interesting.

Everything is ready for Momose to show up at Hajime’s work. I wonder what this server will say.

I am ready at a moment’s notice to spread the good word of the Mystery Research Club!

Big fan of Ika Musume (I read the manga before watching the anime). I look forward to the day that the author’s other big work, Assemble! Mysterious Research Club, is granted an anime adaptation. I prefer it to Ika Musume in manga form, but they are both great.

Yeah, this has been my experience as well. A couple sources fetch all but the final couple pages. The cynical side of me wonders if this is a way to kick people off their api and make them look at the web view (so that ads load).

It’s more that the West has just recently discovered Uma Musume. The show and the game it is based on has been enormously popular in Japan since its inception. I guess it just takes some time for a general audience to acclimate to the idea of racing horse girls.

As for the show itself, I haven’t watched it. However, I have seen it praised highly and seen some really, really well animated clips. They really put that gacha game money to use when they are animating this. @Endmaker@ani.social has had really great things to say about the story as well, and I have seen elsewhere that it is a great example of a sports anime (if that’s your thing).

Reina doing Daichi a huge favor. She is now both of their best friend.

Just caught up on this series. I think it’s interesting that we are getting some backstory for Saya, but what we have seen so far doesn’t match up with what these other survivors have said. Probably more backstory next chapter.

Don’t feel bad Naruto, I totally thought she had died from that conversation as well. Another great chapter.

I love how extremely meta this battle is. However, it is also confusing as hell. I absolutely got faked out by that ending page in the middle of the chapter.

Lila and the Winds of War sounds interesting. Seems like an interesting mix of history with supernatural plus a lot of room for philosophical debate.

Despite it being a short, holiday week this past week here in the US, I have been absolutely slammed with work. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to watch any anime for the past two weeks now. So, I thought I might as well provide a bit of a meta update here in the comments.

Year End Awards

I think that for this year I am going to move the 2025 Anime and Manga year-end awards into January (probably late Jan). One of the main points of feedback I got from that process last year is that it felt weird to vote on the awards while the Fall season was still airing. So, we can fix that! I think late January might work better since the beginning of a new season is always busy, so let’s give it a couple weeks to settle down first.

I have been absolutely slammed with work the past couple weeks, so I have read very little and am behind on just about everything. However, there are two series that ended this past week that I was reading and I wanted to at least try to capture my thoughts on them.

• Sometimes Even Reality Is a Lie! / Real mo Tama ni wa Uso o Tsuku

I have followed this series basically since the translations started (6 years ago!) and it finally wrapped up after 240 chapters. Overall, this series has been really great. It started out as a silly romcom that featured lots of cross dressing and a socially anxious gamer girl. It slowly evolved into a pretty heartfelt romance. Then, finally, it kept the story going after the ship set sail and they had to figure out their lives after high school. Looking back on it now, I never felt like it really dropped off at any point, it just kept being solid the whole way through. It’s been a lot of fun and the meme credit pages have been great to match. If you are looking for a series to binge, you could do a lot worse than this one.

• Senpai, Can I Have a Moment? / Senpai, Chotto ii Desu ka?

This series basically centered around a kouhai that is a bit clueless about how things work since she was so sheltered growing up, but a kindhearted senpai gets roped into helping answer her questions. Cue romcom hijinks and a cast of wacky characters. I enjoyed this series, but I don’t really think it is too special, and I could imagine a lot of people might not enjoy the leads too much. Neither of them are very expressive and a romance between two kuudere doesn’t really get the sparks flying. The ending was pretty satisfying, so it doesn’t feel too rushed at the end.