PeterAhlstrom

Oh dear.

Oldschool? That manga is still running!

I think the dead brother is Sora Inoue.

Baby Steps's season 2 finale was yesterday and I already miss it so much. It was the one show that we really looked forward to every week. Arrrgh. Sigh. 51 episodes of the anime covered 181 chapters of the manga. The manga is now beyond 310 chapters. So I'm optimistic that we'll get a third season starting in April! I've said before in this thread that the first season had a low production budget. That problem is gone in the second season.

It's not really radio silence on this one. We just don't want it to get hyped prematurely. New pages keep coming in all the time. We just got the final pencils on page 17 of chapter 4 today. The book is 6 chapters long. Chapter 1 has been colored and lettered. I think chapter 2 has been colored as well.

Brandon knew Isaac already, and he was sketching when Brandon and a group of people went to dinner after his class one day. I think that's how the story goes. Isaac is our art director. So for things like the broadsheets, he tells Ben what to do. Though he started doing that after Way of Kings and Alloy of Law.

I used to work for TOKYOPOP and of course have a ton of manga on my shelf. Recently most of the manga I read is in the Shonen Jump app and the Crunchyroll manga app, since I'm subscribed to both.

We've caught up on Baby Steps as of last night. This really is a great show. I think the second season has a slightly higher budget than the first; the production values seem a bit higher. The writing on the last few matches has been excellent, and the pacing continues to be very good. I watched the first episode of Plastic Memories and it is probably going to be too depressing for my tastes, so I'll probably pass. I've watched 16 episodes of Food Wars. I do love the story on this, but the nudity and jiggling would put it beyond my tolerance if I weren't such a fan of the manga. I mean really, for a show that is about cooking, why so much nudity and jiggling? Watched an episode of Yamada-kun and the Seven Witches. The manga for this is very good and I'm about halfway through. A certain amount of fanservice is part of the point of this series, so I hope it doesn't get too annoying in the anime. The writing is very clever, so I hope the anime holds up. Watched the first episode of Akame ga Kill, and it's probably too bloody to continue. Have watched 2 episodes of Sound! Euphonium and this is a cute show. Will continue, but not for binging. Watched the 2 free episodes of Overlord on Funimation. Another Sword Art Online/Log Horizon setup, but with a dude playing an evil overlord skeleton character, may be trapped in this game all by himself. I may watch more of this someday, but I'm not super impressed with Funimation's simulcast lineup. Crunchyroll's is satisfying to me. And Haikyuu is coming back in October!!

I did try watching Nichijou, two or three episodes. It was way too random and nonsensical and I didn't care what was happening to anyone, so I stopped watching.

We have now watched 18 episodes of Baby Steps. Man, I really do like this show, and the production values continue to be so crappy. That's really strange. I guess it just highlights the strength of the original manga, or at least the scripting for the anime. The voice acting is all good though, so thank goodness that's not a problem. Though honestly, I've seen very few shows with bad voice actors. The only thing I can think of is the original Bleach animated special before the series came out, when Kubo himself did the voice of Kon in Ichigo form. That one voice was simply bad, because Kubo is no voice actor. Anyway, Baby Steps. So much faster paced than other sports anime I've seen. 18 episodes covers slightly more than one year, and it doesn't agonize over every single game. Contrast this to Yowapeda, which takes 62 episodes to cover a few months, and 40 of those episodes cover 3 days. More middle of the road is Haikyuu, which also has pretty good pacing, but not as fast as Baby Steps. There was one of the opponents in Baby Steps who I felt was just ridiculous. But everyone else is pretty realistic in the presentation.

Liveship is my favorite Robin Hobb by far. The third-person multiple-character-POVs just gives it a more epic feel, and the character growth in some of the characters was amazing to me. A certain whiny brat who I at first hated turned into one of my favorite characters in the trilogy. Now, what I remember of the second book of Farseer is that it is seriously, seriously depressing! If there is romance in the first part, you must not yet have gotten to the part where everything sucks for Fitz. And everything is going to suck for Fitz, especially in the romance department, for a lot of books after that (though it eventually resolves ). So if the happy happy romance is grating on you now, don't worry, you'll probably like the part that gets depressing. I actually do highly recommend that you just keep reading. There is some worldbuilding retconning that happens in the third book, but overall the entire series is some of the best fantasy I've ever read. However, a big part of it is the Orson Scott Card writing method, "Find the thing that will hurt your character the most, and do that to them." Be prepared.

My wife Karen has struggled with depression all her life and was recently diagnosed with bipolar type II. This movie hit us very hard. She says that some movies are just fun and forgettable, but some movies will have a long-lasting net positive influence on the world. This movie is one of the latter type. It provides a framework for certain people to discuss what's going on in their lives, who before had no way to describe or understand what they're going through.

We've now watched 6 episodes of Baby Steps. I really liked what happened in his first official match. So that's good. But yeah, this is the laziest art of any anime I've watched in a long time. I'm enjoying it in spite of that. After 24 episodes of World Trigger, I do enjoy it. Not quite as much as I enjoy the manga just because of pacing. I still laugh whenever the open credits run sometime past the 10-minute mark of the episode.

You can see on Amazon that the book is coming out February 16th. I can confirm that that is the release date. (Though occasionally a book will slide a week or so in one direction or another for various reasons.) We got cover proofs in last week, and it's shiny. It will be publicly announced pretty soon, I believe. I personally have a lot of work to do on the book between now and July 24th. It's just a bit stressful because I have so many things to work on at the same time—Shadows of Self and Elantris proofreads are due Monday, and Bands of Mourning line edits could come in at any moment. Alcatraz 5 line edits already came in and I have to squeeze those in too when I can find time. The Calamity beta read is happening now. Brandon will finish up the final draft in August and then it will be copyedited.

The involved planets are actually in a rather small star cluster, much smaller than a dwarf galaxy. This star cluster is within a galaxy.

I should have read through this thread earlier, so I could have told Tor earlier that they were using the wrong version of the text and to please update it to fix those errors that were already changed in the latest text.

Tor.com put up the wrong version of the text. I've asked them to update it.

They're using an old version of the chapter. That was already fixed.

I like FMA even more than HxH. But I'm more interested in non-fighting interactions between the characters. There has to be a good reason for fighting.

The audiobook is going to be redone with a different narrator.

The UK covers are really not illustrative. They're meant to create a mood rather than show particular characters. It seems to work for the UK market.

Oh right, I wanted to mention another series of CJ Cherryh's. If you liked Brandon's story Sixth of the Dusk, then you should read CJ Cherryh's Rider at the Gate and Cloud's Rider. These two books have a magic system very similar to Sixth of the Dusk. Technically they are science fiction, in that it's a lost colony of humans who are stuck on an alien planet, but it's not very technological at all. Instead of psychic birds, there are psychic horses. Like the birds in Sixth of the Dusk, the horses mask the minds of the people from the predators in the wild who can sense minds.

I love Uprooted so much. It's a very different type of book from her Temeraire books, but it's also very different from something like Brandon's books. I really liked Blood's Pride by Evie Manieri. I haven't gotten to the next book yet but it's on my to-read pile. Los McMaster Bujold mainly writes great fun science fiction, but her fantasies are also very good. Definitely read The Curse of Chalion and Paladin of Souls. Chalion made me cry harder than any book I've ever read, and Paladin is all-around a bit better book (and won the Hugo). Her Sharing Knife books are also quite good, though more relationship-focused (still, the magic & villain-force-of-nature is very cool), but you must consider the four books to actually be two books that each got split in half. They're not quite as satisfying individually. Robin Hobb got mentioned; her Liveship books are my favorite. They have a broader scope, a more epic feel, which may appeal more to Brandon fans than the Fitz books. CJ Cherryh mostly writes science fiction but her Fortress fantasy books are also very good. Fortress in the Eye of Time is the first one; it takes a while to get into but it really pays off. (I found her Russian fantasy books starting with Rusalka to be a bit too opaque for me.) Her Foreigner series is fantasy-like science fiction and is now at 16 books. (I only read the first 4 or so.) I love love Tooth and Claw by Jo Walton, which is about dragon society. I didn't like her book Among Others, which is about being a teenager who loves to read science fiction books (plus some thrown-in magic). Those are the only two of hers I've read so far. I thought N.K. Jemisin's 100,000 Kingdoms was excellent, but I haven't gotten to her other books yet.

General comments.

I really enjoy reading the Food Wars manga in Viz's Shonen Jump, so I had been looking forward to the anime. Unfortunately, directorial choices are highlighting issues that I gloss over while reading, like excessive "male gaze." Also, the "disrobing" that I see as quirky in the manga becomes very creepy. They're just dwelling on it in the anime, when in the manga there's one (large) panel. We've seen two episodes, but probably won't watch more, at least not together. I do want to get the early part of the story, but maybe I should just buy the manga volumes. We also finally watched one episode of Nobunagun. Entertaining enough to see another, and I like the art style. We've watched a little more of Baby Steps and while the plot is decent for what it is, the low-budget art is bothering me more. Most of the characters have just totally flat one-color hair, and it's really lazy. We watched I think 3 episodes of Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet on Netflix. I like a lot of things about it. Though the planet is really much more aqueous than verdurous.