Retsam

The original version is pretty fantastic, too, IMO. And, from what I gather, quite different than Brotherhood. (I've never actually seen past the first few episodes of Brotherhood, admittedly) They start of covering the same material, at a point the original diverges heavily and tells its own story (because the manga wasn't finished yet). I've fairly frequently heard a lot of people say that Brotherhood has a tighter plot and more of a shounen tone, while the original has stronger atmosphere and themes, with a darker tone (edging on seinen) and persistent melancholic mood. And Bratja. The ending of the original is a bit weird - again, I actually really like it thematically and in terms of tone - but it's a sort of non-ending (with a big plot twist right at the end). The follow-up movie sort of resolves this but was also kinda mediocre. It's weird to say, but I'd love to see a sequel to the 2003 FMA series. But ending weirdness aside, I do think the original version is worth checking out, even after having seen Brotherhood.

2018 was a really strong year for anime, overall. I watched a ton of stuff that I really enjoyed. March Comes in like a Lion’s second season was really strong, and the show as a whole is one of my favorite of all time. The big shounens - My Hero Academia, Attack on Titan, and SAO - are as good as (or better than) they’ve ever been. Almost every season had some unexpectedly good gem - A Place Further than the Universe from last winter, especially, but also Hinamatsuri from the spring and last season’s Rascal Does Not Dream of Bunny Girl Senpai. And I know I missed some big stuff, like Violet “Don’t Call Me Saber” Evergarden and I’m still working on finishing Steins;Gate 0. The only season that was a bit quiet for me was the summer: other than SAO and AoT, I watched Grand Blue a drunken comedy that was good, but not great. The only real disappointments was Iroduku: The World in Colors from last season - which was just painfully average, despite some nice visuals - and, of course, Dumpster Fire in the FranXX. And yeah, like I said above, Rascal Does Not Dream of Bunny Girl Senpai was a real gem - way better than the title or basic plot summary would suggest. And despite the prominent placement of a bunny girl outfit in both the title and promotional artwork, it’s very wholesome (not ecchi at all). It’s basically about helping people deal with emotional issues, which have a supernatural physical manifestation (called, awkwardly “puberty syndrome”). For example, the first arc deals with a main character whose feelings of isolation and figurative social invisibility manifest in literal invisibility. This still sounds a bit stereotypical (and it kinda is) but the show executes this premise really well. It’s briskly paced: 13 episodes adapts a whole five arcs. And though there’s a few places where a bit more time wouldn’t have hurt, especially the two two-episode arcs, overall the pacing works well: each arc is setup, developed, and poignantly resolved without ever overstaying its welcome or becoming overwrought. The main character is great, a very dry and constant sarcastic sense of humor, and great banter; especially his chemistry with the main female lead. And their relationship as a whole is one of the best aspects of the show: very unlike stereotypical anime relationships. My only main complaint is the obligatory complaint that it’s an unfinished adaptation of an unfinished light novel series: it’s less problematic here as each arc stands pretty well on its own, and there’s a movie coming out later this year that should give the series some closure.

I watched the first episode of Progressive on a lark; but I've only got vague memories of the original and it was never a favorite of mine. In lieu of my own opinions, a few non-spoilery ones from reddit: I'm not cherry picking, those are pretty much the top comments over on the reddit thread for the last episode. It seems like a pretty solid consensus that it was fine but really didn't live up to the original.

In a sense, Darling in the FranXX didn't let me down. One of my main thoughts when starting this show was "if it's a trainwreck, I don't want to miss it", and the last few episodes have not let me down on that account in the slightest. I don't think the ending was popular, even among the fans, and my skepticism gave way to disillusionment back at Episode 15. So as background, the show is set in a dystopian future where a group of teenagers fight giant robot dinosaurs via piloting waifu-shaped robots, via sexual metaphor butt controls. Hiro[1], the erstwhile leader, no longer fits into the group because he has "performance issues" while trying to pilot the mech, until a naked pink haired demon chick shows up ("Zero Two"... but I'm just going to call a spade a spade and call her "Waifu"), declares Hiro to be her "darling", and invites him to "ride her mech" and the first 18 episodes or so are about the squad fighting robot dinosaurs and love triangles. And, y'know, I'm just going to put the entire ending plot in a massive spoiler tag. In a sense it's safe to read because it's only going to spoil you for an anime that I really can't recommend watching... but I'm mostly writing this out of catharsis. (Each paragraph basically corresponds to an episode, in terms of pacing) The summary is ridiculous, and it certainly wasn't a "it makes sense in context" thing for me: it's a pretty big shift that largely comes out of nowhere. You can tell that they were sort of going for a story structure reminiscent of Gurren Laggan (also by Studio Trigger), but it just didn't work here: Gurren Laggan turns things up to twelve in its ending, but it did so in a way that felt like an extension of what came before, in a way that this doesn't. It just feels as if the genre suddenly shifts at the end. (For example, with the introduction of supernatural elements that weren't present up to this point) And it's a shame, because I really think this could have been a good show. (And I do know a lot of people enjoyed it) I liked the side characters, the premise was interesting (if not hugely original), the "mecha as metaphor for relationship" is a schtick with potential and the production values were pretty high across the board. But the show's a bit too bipolar (perhaps as a result of the two studios behind it): a more crazy (Studio Trigger-esque) version with fast pacing and playing the innuendo and premise for laughs could have worked. A more nuanced, drama-based version of the show could have worked. Instead we got the worst of both worlds; the plot was ridiculous, but not in a self-aware way, and the drama raised some tough issues, but without the nuance to really handle them appropriately. It couldn't decide if it wanted its central premise of "mecha as sex metaphor" to be an exploration of unbound teenage sexuality in a society that hasn't equipped them to deal with it properly... or if they just wanted to make "lol masturbation" jokes. But if I'm being honest, even more than the tone and the ending, the big reason why the show didn't work for me is that I couldn't buy into the main characters relationship. Their relationship is consistently presented as great and truly romantic, but I couldn't see it as anything other than glorification of an abusive and destructive relationship (a fairly rare example of female on male abuse). A more nuanced story could have handled this relationship well and had real character growth leading towards an actually healthy relationship, and for a hot second (Episode 14) I thought they were actually going to do that, only to have the next episode go with the "no, it's okay because he's really obsessed with her". No thanks. I guess what I'm really saying is that after 18 episodes of foreplay, the climax was disappointing and I feel like I need to go take a shower now. --- On a much more positive note, it seems like every season there's an unexpected gem; with Made in Abyss last summer, Houseki no Kuni in fall, A Place Further than the Universe in the winter season, and this season it was Hinamatsuri. It's a comedy/drama about girls with psychic powers that arrive unexpectedly on earth... the main character shows up in the bedroom of a Yakuza and convinces him to take care of him by threatening his pot collection. It's a weird premise, but it really worked and managed to land both the comedy and drama sides really well. (Like so many anime, though, it's an incomplete adaptation, with a pretty major sequel hook... hopefully there'll be a season 2) --- The upcoming season looks pretty slow, though, so hopefully I'll get through some backlog. --- [1] I'd complain about the stereotypical "Hiro" as name of the protagonist shtick, but the names are actually something I liked about the show. Every character has a numerical code assigned by the society, but they've given themselves names, based on the numbers. So Hiro is number 16, "1 = Hitotsu, 6 = Roku", hence "Hiro". And there's a bit of a social structure with the lower numbers being ranked higher. It's alluded to, but never directly stated, as far as I remember, that under this system Zero Two's name would be "0 = O, 2 = Ni" or "Oni", the horned demon that her character design references.

I'm pretty inconsistent nowadays as well. All else being equal, I think I prefer English dubs: it just makes it a bit easier to watch, and especially if I'm trying to multitask. And I think I can just appreciate a good dub more than I can appreciate a good sub: since I don't speak Japanese, I can't hear the nuances of Japanese speaking to know if it's natural sounding or not, but I can really appreciate a good dub (FMA, Trigun, especially Steins;Gate) But as I've gotten into watching seasonal stuff, and with Crunchyroll as my main source for anime, I've been watching a ton of subtitled shows in the last years, so I'm sure I've watched way more subtitled stuff than dubbed stuff at this point. And it is nice, as I've been studying Japanese.

So it's basically the end of the anime season, and I've been watching three things: A Place Farther than the Universe (Sora yori mo Tooi Basho) is done, last episode aired today. It's about a bunch of high school girls going to Antarctica... and it's a lot better than that description sounds. It's a phenomenal show. I was worried this show was just going to run on "Cute Girls Doing Cute Things" appeal, but thankfully that wasn't the case. The characters are great: memorable without feeling like one-note stereotypes, and they've got a lot of chemistry. The show alternates between conveying a sense of pure joy of adventure, and some pretty well-done character drama for each of the four lead characters: it's simultaneously a very "feel good" sort of show and a bit of a tearjerker at moments. I think my only complaint (other than a single scene that bothers me for pedantic reasons[1]) is that I wish it were a bit longer. It's probably good that the show left me wanting more, and not the reverse, but it did feel like it could have comfortably have supported another episode or two. In any case, highly recommended. --- Similarly, I'm realizing with dread how little of March Comes in Like a Lion is left. With two, double-length seasons in fairly quick succession, and the slow pace at which I went, I started this show over a year ago, and have been watching fairly consistently ever since (with a "My Hero Academia"-sized hiatus in the middle). It's going to be weird for me when this show is no longer airing, just out of force of habit, at this point. But it's also just continuing to be really good. It just recently had a 2-episode arc that was one of its best: the show's had a running joke about the shogi association trying to advertise a match between two of its older, more physically frail members (with the president jokingly suggesting they should include a heart rate and electrocardiogram monitor into the TV broadcast). ... but that joke transitioned into a pretty serious pair of episodes focusing on the older shogi player grappling with the burdens and expectations of being the oldest shogi player. So, yeah, two old side-characters sitting down playing a board game turned out to be one of my favorite episodes of anime this season. It helps if you've got really, good, visuals, to go with it. It's a microcosm of what's great about the show: the mix of humor and drama, the metaphorical visuals to represent internal conflict, and the hidden depths in its side characters. I'm going to really miss it when it's done. (With no soon prospect of a season 3, either) --- On the less positive side, Darling in the FranXX. I've been saying "I'll post on it when I know how I feel about it", and frankly, I'm still waiting. Part of the issue is that the show has just felt inconsistent to me: the first three or so episodes felt like over-the-top parody, to the point I thought this was going to be the next Kill La Kill, but then it transitions into a much more serious[2] focus on the relationship between the main character for about three more episodes, but then it transitions again and the last 5 episodes have focused on the overall dystopia and group dynamics. And by "group dynamics", of course I mean "love triangles"[3]. Re-reading that above paragraph, I really should hate this show. It's gone from tasteless innuendo, to a romance between two characters with no chemistry, to the plot of a stereotypical YA novel. But, despite all that, I find I'm still enjoying the show. The side-characters are likable, the world-building is still interesting albeit stereotypical, and I think there's an (ever-diminishing) chance that this show might still go somewhere interesting. And the show's still getting pretty positive reception over on reddit[4], but even there it seems like everyone's just waiting for that episode, but we're almost halfway through this show, and it still all just feels like set-up. I mean, come on, it's the ham-handed sex metaphor show, there's got to be a climax in here eventually. --- I'll be filling the Sora Yori-shaped hole in my schedule with Sound! Euphonium. I've seen it pretty highly recommended, and I think it fits the same "almost, but not quite CGDCT" genre as Sora Yori, and r/anime just started a rewatch. A bit of a rocky start, I watched the first episode thought it was weird how dense the show was: it was a double-length episode, and they just dropped characters on you without really introducing them, which I thought was a really novel approach. I was just beginning to think this show was the high-school band anime equivalent of Malazan Book of the Fallen, when I realized that I actually watched the first episode of the second season. (In my defense, Crunchyroll's UI kinda sucks on that front, and it was 3:30AM...) --- [1] I don't care how nice the insert song is, or how good a character moment it is, you don't go out on the deck of a ship in the middle of a huge storm, much less leave the hatch open. That's a great way to get lost at sea and/or sink the boat. [2] With the word "serious" here depending on however seriously you can take a show with Butt-based Mecha Controls. [3] Spoiler up to the most recent episode, but someone made a relationship flowchart. It's a pretty easy game of "spot the main character". [4] ... though a lot of the reddit praise seems driven by the "02 best waifu ever" camp, seemingly because she's hot, pink-haired and gets naked in the first episode. She might get some character development later, but so far she's mostly functioned as a Magical Girlfriend and/or Manic Pixie Dream Girl. She's not even best girl in this show.

If you don't mind, I'm mostly going to just quote a previous answer to a similar question from the previous anime topic: FYI, there's an updated version of the flowchart, that's way too big to include here, except as a link. The specific recommendation I'd add to the above is Code Geass. It's something of a natural follow-up to Death Note, in my opinion. They've got lots of similarities, and also came out at basically the same time (so they're on the TvTropes list of Dueling Works). Like Death Note, Code Geass also about an egotistical teen genius who gets a superpower which he uses "for Justice", who may or may not really be a villain, depending on who you ask. Personally, I happen to prefer Code Geass over Death Note, and have it in my top five anime, but it's the weirder of the two shows: I've described it before as "a political, sci-fi mecha show about terrorism and racism with magic and slice-of-life romantic comedy". There was a recent thread on the anime reddit to "sum up an anime with a single screenshot", and this picture from Code Geass had the most points: It's also got one of the best endings in all of anime, which they're going to totally ruin later this year with a Season 3 that nobody asked for. So if you really liked Death Note, and want more of that, I'd say Code Geass is worth taking a look at.

I've been having a good run of solid anime, recently. I mentioned Land of the Lustrous on the last thread. (And I'm still listening to the soundtrack, even right now) I'm also caught up on March Comes Like A Lion, which has just hit the second half of its second season. It's a really good drama show, which is a bit of a departure from the shounen action stuff that I tend to watch. It's a show about a high-schooler Shogi player (Japanese relative of chess) who struggles with depression. Apparently it's comparable to Your Lie in April? I haven't seen it, but I've seen a number of comparisons made between the two. Despite being a show about depression, though, it's fairly upbeat most of the time: in fact, the first episode is actually a bit whiplash inducing: the first half of the episode is very somber and subdued and quiet, while the second half is cheerful and colorful and frenetic. That whiplash, along with the medias res opening, made the show a bit challenging to get into, but it's something I've really appreciated about the show: instead of just being constant depression, it's a show of contrast, with the cheerful bits contrasted against the sometimes depressing subject matter. It's overall style took a bit of getting used to, too. The art is generally very nice (it's animated by Shaft, of Madoka and Monogatari fame), though it frequently shifts into different art styles for bits of imagery or for jokes (it even shifts into 8-bit RPG graphics for one joke), and it's the most direct manga adaptation I've ever seen: episodes are broken into chapters, corresponding to the manga chapters, and it has lots of the manga onomatopoeia and even some footnotes. But for all that it's one of the stranger shows that I've seen in some ways, it's likely my favorite show that I've watched in quite awhile. It's filled with memorable characters, some genuinely good humor, and it manages to be a "feel good" show in the best sort of way. --- Meanwhile, my wife and I are watching Princess Principal. It's a steampunk setting of London that was split by a civil war (in a East Berlin/West Berlin sort of situation), in which a group of schoolgirls act as spies infiltrating the other half of the city. Despite the title and absurd premise, it's a pretty serious show, there's genuine tension, intrigue, and drama to the show. We're halfway in, and I'm really interested to see where it goes. It's not the sort of show I would have checked out, if not for the good reviews it was getting (and frankly, because I thought it would appeal to my wife's interests), but if it sounds at all interesting, you might try the first episode. It's available on Amazon Prime (in the US, at least), now that Amazon's paid anime streaming service bit the dust. --- I'm also watching Rage of Bahamut: Genesis, which came out a few years ago, and is a shockingly good "adaptation" of a mediocre mobile game. It's a fairly standard D&D setting, but it's just a fun adventure romp that doesn't take itself too seriously, with a main character reminiscent of Captain Jack Sparrow. It's been a pretty fun watch so far, and there's a sequel ongoing right now.

Not necessarily, I read Percy Jackson and the Olympians while in college and really enjoyed it. (I was doing a summer job cleaning schools, found myself with spare time in a middle school library) But I think Riordan's writing has really gotten worse since PJatO: Heroes of Olympus got worse as it went, and I wasn't super impressed with the Norse books, either. (Never read the Egyptian ones, on reputation) It's not that I'm old (I was already "old" relative to the target audience), I just think he's writing worse books. I like Firefly and think it's good... but it also helps the show a lot that it got to set up and tease a bunch of plot hooks, but never had to deliver on them. I always imagine if Lost had been cancelled after its first or second season - there'd be a similar backlash and a lot of people who would think it's the "best show ever" - but in reality it kept going and ended up disappointing people with the answers, or lack of answers, to the questions that it raises in its early seasons. I'm not saying that I think a full Firefly would have been disappointing or bad, (I definitely prefer Whedon over Abrams in terms of storytelling)... but it's unlikely that it would have completely lived up to the sky-high expectations that the first season created. As someone who didn't like it, every opinion of The Last Jedi is controversial.

I watched the whole of Land of the Lustrous (Houseki no Kuni) over the last few days (which wasn't particularly difficult to do so, as it's only twelve episodes), as it's been getting a ton of praise from the bits of the anime community that I'm exposed to. And by-and-large, it definitely deserves the hype, in my book. It's about anthropomorphic gemstones that are thousands of years old but look like young girls*, defending themselves from invaders from the moon, that take the form of Hindu statu... okay, the premise is odd, but the execution is solid. Interestingly, one of the strongest aspects of the show is its visuals - the show looks really good, and sells the "human gemstones" premise well, and has some solid action scenes. However, it's particularly noteworthy, because the show is entirely CGI. It's a landmark, as it's the first time that I've seen an all-CGI show get this amount of widespread praise for its visuals. Previous all-CGI anime, like Studio Polygon's Ajin or Knights of Sidonia, have had passable visuals, with a "you get used to it eventually" disclaimer (that was definitely my experience), but this show just looks good, full stop**. (Also, the soundtrack is really good, too) And it's not all just aesthetics, the premise is interesting (if weird), and there's some really phenomenal character development. The story is good too... as much of it as we have. Unfortunately, the major achilles heel of the show is that it's just a partial adaptation of a larger story, and there's no resolution to it. The main character has a solid character arc, the story works really well as a coming-of-age tale... but the main plot itself doesn't really resolve anything in this first season (and there's currently no confirmation of a season two). This certainly didn't ruin the show for me, it's still an absolute "gem" of a show, but it's the one thing that prevents me from unconditionally recommending this show like something like Madoka or Steins;Gate. --- * Thankfully, despite the appearance of the cast, it's really not a "cute girls doing cute things" show, or particularly sexualized (despite a few lingering butt shots here and there). ** You can actually compare the actual show's CGI trailer with a traditionally animated promotion for the manga, and the CGI version just looks better (to me, at least). The CGI effect for the gemstone hair looks really good, as well as all the liquid body and dynamic motion used in the show.

I've gone a little ways down the history podcast rabbit hole: I highly recommend Dan Carlin's Hardcore History, even to people not particularly interested in history. The name is a bit eye-roll inducing, but it's a phenomenal show. His stuff is really closer to an audiobook than a podcast episode; (for example: his latest episode The Celtic Holocaust is a 6 hour episode on Caesar's Gallic campaigns, when he does multi-part episodes, they've gotten as long as ~24 hours), and my only complaint is that they're not long enough and don't come out often enough. He's a great story teller: he takes things from interesting perspectives and gives plenty of details, but never loses the core of the story or gets bogged down in minutia. He's done multi-part series on Persian Empire (King of Kings), on the Punic Wars, (Punic Nightmares), on the fall of the Roman Republic (Death Throes of the Republic), on the Mongolian Empire (Wrath of the Khans), WWI (Blueprint for Armageddon) and the Eastern Front of WWII (Ghosts of the Ostfront), and a number of single episodes on a variety of topics. --- I also like Mike Duncan's stuff: History of Rome is what got me going on history podcasts: it's not the gripping storytelling of Dan Carlin, but it's a solid episode-by-episode chronological history of Rome up until the fall of the Western Roman Empire. It's a pretty iconic story, and pretty interesting throughout (though the Crisis of the Third Century was a bit overwhelming). It's ~179 episodes, about a half-hour each episode once it hits its stride: as with a lot of podcasts, the quality picks up a lot after the first few episodes. His new show, Revolutions is pretty good too, though I haven't listened to a ton of it. --- And, in the same vein, Chris Stewart's History of China is the current podcast I'm working through, which was inspired by the History of Rome podcast. The History of China podcast hits its stride a bit quicker than the History of Rome, and overall the I think the quality (in terms of delivery and such) might be a bit higher, but it's a lot more difficult podcast for me, due to the subject matter: It covers a lot larger stretch of time, there's a ton of periods of internal strife (which means lots of characters and lots of "moving parts" which complicate the story), and the names are tricky: names are both foreign and unfamiliar to me, and Chinese names are very frequently similar sounding or just the same name. (For example, there's a "Sixteen Kingdoms" period, in which there are five separate kingdoms called "Liang", four called "Yan", three called "Qin", and two "Zhaos"... and there's more than sixteen kingdoms, too) It's immensely interesting to me, as I know so little about Chinese History, and it's really well conveyed, but I'm having to put in a lot more mental effort to "stay afloat", compared to the History of Rome. (And especially compared to Hardcore History).

Speaking of movies, it's been a really good year for anime movies. Though, I suppose I don't have much point of comparison, as I hadn't seen an anime movie in theaters (other than Pokemon) before this year, and now I've watched three this year. (Or five, if you the count screenings of old Ghibli movies) One was the SAO movie, which, as I said before was better than I expected (if nothing to write home about or particularly go out of your way to see). And, Your Name (Kimi no Na wa) was really good. I'm surprised no one has mentioned it here --- And then this week, my wife and I went out to catch a screening of Koe no Katachi (billed as "A Silent Voice", but the movie seems to translate its own title more literally as "The Shape of Voice"). It was moderately hard to find a screening (only one theater in the entire state of Indiana), and it was only showing for two nights. I think this was a limited release to qualify for the Oscars, (as Your Name did last year around this time); I'm guessing they'll have another, larger release sometime in 2018. If so, I'd highly recommend it. Though, compared to Your Name, it's a big weightier and heavier. It's a pretty bittersweet film with pretty serious subject matter: it's about a deaf girl who gets bullied in elementary school and about the boy who bullied her, and the first scene of the movie is the boy, (now in high school), contemplating suicide. It's also got lighter moments; my wife and I laughed quite a bit, despite the overall seriousness of the movie - that sort of "emotional whiplash" seems to somewhat of an anime staple; I know some people don't like it, but I definitely wouldn't have enjoyed the film as much if it had just been two hours of sadness - but it's overall a very bittersweet sort of film. That's not usually my cup of tea; but I really enjoyed it in this case.

I've also been watching Studio Ghibli movies for the first time (they've been showing them in movie theaters this summer and fall), and also have had pretty much the same reaction: they're fun movies, but nothing particularly life-changing. (They're a lot like Pixar movies, to me, in that way: cute but mostly forgettable.) Anime is a pretty diverse medium, I definitely wouldn't write off the whole medium just on your failure to enjoy one particular flavor of it. --- If you're looking for recommendations, the safest recommendation is probably My Hero Academia, which is the current mega popular show. And, deservedly so, it's really good. (For once, it's a popular show that didn't spark a massive critical backlash from the more veteran anime watchers, like previous popular shows have: e.g. Tokyo Ghoul, SAO, or Attack on Titan) My traditional recommendation is Trigun, which is an old classic and is one of my all-time favorites. A bit like FMA, it's an action show that's got some comedy but is also pretty serious (increasingly so, over time). Otherwise, I've linked this flowchart before: And there's also a longer version here (too large to include in the file). The longer version has a lot more recommendations, but has a lot more obscure stuff that I don't know that I'd recommend to a newcomer. As for where to watch stuff, I think both Crunchyroll and Funimation have a fair bit of their stuff available for free. (For example, Funimation's official YouTube channel has Trigun... the full series in Japanese, but only the first four episodes of the English dub... which is a shame because the dub is phenomenal)

Steinbeck is probably best known for Grapes of Wrath (read it, didn't particularly care for it) or Of Mice and Men (which, admittedly, I haven't read); but East of Eden is one of the best books I've ever read. I mostly stick to Fantasy and Sci-Fi, but it's one of the few books of "classic" literature that I have to go and re-read every once and awhile. It's a difficult book to describe, it's sort of a multi-generational retelling of the Cain and Abel story, sort of an exploration of human potential for good and evil, but largely it's a just a compelling story with some really great characters. (Oh, and a bit of trivia if anyone's a fan of Mumford And Sons: their song Timshel is a direct reference to East of Eden)

Brent Weeks, for example.

Actually, "Morning Star" also appears in Revelations 22:16, as a title of Jesus. Granted, it's a different Greek word, in Isaiah it's Φωσφόρος (in the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the OT that was in use when the NT was written), while the Revelations passage is ὁ ἀστὴρ ὁ λαμπρός, ὁ πρωϊνός ("star, bright, morning", but translated "bright morning star") so the similarity between the titles is only really an English language thing, I think. But that's why "Morning Star" as a title carries some ambiguity to it. (Fun fact, that bit of ambiguity is why it was chosen for the title of the third Red Rising book)

I'll echo ongoing disappointment with the Rick Riordan books: the social issues thing is part of it, but overall the writing is just been on a decline, IMO. I don't think it's bad that he's trying to address social issues or have more diversity (but maybe "everyone is a minority now" is a bit of an overcorrection), but the seemingly shoehorning of social issues was to the point that it actually got in the way of the actual story being told, I though. Blood of Olympus was a real mess as a conclusion to an entire series, and part of that, I feel was because it was sidetracked on social issues: we get an entire arc for Reyna, which TvTropes labels a "feminist fantasy": her arc is "admitting that she shouldn't define herself by the men in her life, and dealing with Straw Misogynist Orion", and meanwhile a good third of the big climactic battle is taken up with introducing a gay love interest for (totally not retconned) Nico. At best, suddenly introducing a love interest (gay or otherwise) in the last book would have felt a bit forced and awkward, but doing it in the middle of your big climax is just bad writing, IMO. But even beyond the social issues stuff, Heroes of Olympus's writing was just not up to the same quality as Percy Jackson and the Olympians. I really liked the first two, and I loved the idea of the Romans (bit of a Roman history enthusiast), but it just wasn't well executed beyond that: Gaia was a pretty dull and generic antagonist, theoretically all-powerful, but just not that interesting (sort of like your average Marvel Cinematic Universe villain). Kratos wasn't that interesting either, but Luke was an amazing antagonist in Percy Jackson, and he didn't have an equivalent in Heroes of Olympus. In general it felt sort of "big summer blockbuster": "bigger" and flashier than PJatO but not as much heart to it, or even as much tension. The stakes were ostensibly higher but they didn't feel higher: no equivalent to Bianca Di Angelo, in Heroes of Olympus, either, that I remember, House of Hades felt like a "Tartarus Walking Tour", again, ostensibly really dangerous and dramatic, but it sure doesn't cost the characters anything at the end of the day, and the ending is just a bit too neat and all-around happy for everyone, for a series that makes such a big deal about how heroes don't often get happy endings. So, yeah. I didn't hate the Heroes of Olympus: they were decent "popcorn" reading, some good humor, some likable characters, a bit of a crash course in classical mythology... but while PJatO is perhaps my favorite Young Adult series that I've read, Heroes of Olympus is "just okay". --- Also, similar in some ways, I really didn't care for Ready Player One. I had fun while reading it, but the more I thought about it afterwards, the less I liked it. The plot ends up being predictable: it feels "seat of your pants, you don't know what's going to happen next" while you're reading it, but you get to the end and look back and it just did the most predictable and stereotypical thing it could have done at basically every opportunity. I kept expecting some big plot twist or reveal, but the big twist for me was that there wasn't one. And all the 80's nostalgia stuff just didn't do anything for me. Yes, I really like the movie WarGames, but I'm not sure that having several scenes of that movie in this book really added anything to my enjoyment of the book. It's not like the author has anything interesting to say about WarGames or the idea of nostalgia in general (despite ample opportunity): it's just in there because the author likes that stuff. Similarly, there's a bunch of social issues that are there, not because the author has anything particularly interesting to say about them, but they're just sort of there, like he had a quota of social issues to raise, spend 30 seconds on, then never address again: Despite being the core of the premise, the book doesn't have anything interesting to say about environmentalism, or extreme escapism, or virtual reality, in general. (Are the book's world's problems being exacerbated because everyone's just playing on the internet? You could argue that from the book, but the book itself sure doesn't care to think about that) The main character explains directly to the readers that he thinks religion is "crem dung". Why? I don't know, it's never brought up again. They wanted to address homosexuality, racism, obesity, and sexism, I guess, but didn't want to write four different characters to do it, so they put a gay, black, female obese character (in a book that otherwise has no known minorities or homosexuals and the only other female is the love interest). They have a single "racism/sexism/homophobia is bad m'kay" scene, then it never comes up again. It just feels like the author was ticking boxes. "Remind the readers that racism is bad. Check. Inform readers that pollution is bad. Check. Big evil corporation. Check. Giant robot fight scene. Check. It was the ultimate popcorn read: some fun action, but absolutely no depth to it. So I guess the movie will probably be good?

@Left I just finished the second season of Attack on Titan a few days ago, and it's really good. Actually, I thought it was significantly better than the first season in a number of ways: It has a much more consistent pacing: the first couple episodes are a bit slower (at least, retroactively), but once it gets going it stays going, more or less. And that's both in terms of the number of action scenes, but more importantly, the plot itself rolls forward quite a bit in these 13 episodes, a lot quicker than I was expecting it to, there were a couple reveals that I either suspected or was spoiled on that I expected the show to keep in its hat much longer than it did. And in general, it felt like this season had more of an emphasis on plot, world-building, and character development, compared to the first season. And speaking of character development, the second season does a lot better with its secondary characters. Attack on Titan has a reasonably wide cast of secondary characters (I mean, they've got to have someone to kill off), but I didn't feel that Attack on Titan did a great job developing them. I remember Jean getting a bit of development, but otherwise anyone who wasn't one of the "holy trinity" fell by the wayside. The second season does a lot more with it's secondary characters, to the point that the main three barely show up in the first several episodes. Which is great, as it widens the scope of the story, and because a lot of the side-characters are pretty interesting in their own right. Plus, frankly, having less of the "holy trinity" of main characters is rather a benefit in its own right, IMO. Particularly, I feel like Eren works best in small doses. Though, I have decided that he's a bit more interesting of a character than I would have given him credit for originally. While S1 Eren just felt like a stereotypical shonen protagonist who Never Gives Up™, after S2, my perception of him is that he's actually something of a subversion of the standard trope. Tenacity (i.e. never giving up) is often a defining trait (actually, it's often the defining trait) of shonen protagonists, and it's almost always viewed as a positive trait. (This is a large part of what makes Shinji from Neon Genesis Evangelion a subversion: as he's a shonen protagonist who utterly lacks tenacity) But Eren is so tenacious it's actually a character flaw, and it's a lot more obviously presented as such in S2, as both other characters, and even Eren himself acknowledges that fact at one point or another. And I find that that shift in my perspective has helped me quite a bit with dealing with Eren: there's a big difference, to me at least, between a character who is just annoying, and a character who is annoying for a particular storytelling purpose. Granted, that's all very subjective and personal, maybe other people didn't have as much of an issue with Eren in Season 1, or maybe they don't find Season 2 Eren any better, but it was for me, at least. And everything else that was great in Season 1 is still good in Season 2: the art and animation is still great, the soundtrack is still excellent, and the OP is as hype as ever. (Though, I guess it's got my least favorite ED so far: it's visually interesting, but just weird to listen to) Anyway, that's probably more thoughts on Attack on Titan than were strictly necessary. TL;DR it's good. If you liked the first season, you'll almost certainly like the second season, and if you were iffy on the first season, the second season might surprise you. (If you hated the first season, obviously I'd still give the second season a pass, though) --- Otherwise, I'm still slowly working through Konosuba - still funny, still not entirely my sort of humor, but I've actually enjoyed watching the main character's progression; he's sort of doing the "find ways to do useful things with useless powers" bit, which I enjoy. I'm even more slowly working through March Comes in Like a Lion which is good but kinda heavy so not something I want to binge, exactly. And even slower than that, I've picked up Scrapped Princess, though I'm only a handful of episodes in. It's an old show, but I've heard vague descriptions of the magic system and it sounds rather Sandersonesque.

I saw Wonder Woman and thought it good, not great. I don't think the movie did as well at averting the "evil Germans" trope as they could have. The film pays some lip-service to the idea that WWI was a pretty grey on grey war... but that only goes so far when you've got the German leadership giggling over the deadly toxins they're inventing to bomb London with, while on the trenches they're apparently doing horrible things to the towns they occupy. We have to stop the war because it's costing "thousands of German lives" is "we need to stop the war because we're losing" not "because it's a tragic waste of human lives". And even the framing of that scene: the British leadership meets in a well-lit council chamber, while the German leadership is meeting in a dark castle basement. It kinda felt like they were trying to have their cake and eat it too: trying to realistically portray WWI as a tragic conflict in which there really weren't good guys and bad guys... but still have scenes where Wonder Woman got to punch "bad guys". The running across the trench scene and the following village scene really didn't work for me, because it felt like the movie celebrated it as some heroic victory, but the reality is that trench lines shifted back and forth all the time, and that having the people in the village cheer over some Germans getting killed, despite that their village was still ruined, they probably still didn't have any food and they were still in the middle of warzone... it just didn't work for me. And, the movie just gave me a bit of deja vu. Stop me if you've heard this one before: I'm not try to say the Wonder Woman film is a clone of Captain America film, there's some pretty big differences in tone and such, but the similarity still was a bit uncanny. So, yeah, a decent movie. Stacks up against some of the Marvel superhero films (which, as far as I can tell, hasn't happened since the Dark Knight), but it's not near the top of the list for me, personally.

@Bridge Boy For practice on CSS selectors, CSS Diner is a nice little game that's helpful for learning or reviewing CSS selectors. It represents HTML as a table with various things dishes and fruits on it, and you need to write the correct CSS selector to pick various things.

I'd definitely disagree with this, FWIW. I'm only on Book 7, now, and I've been pretty consistently frustrated with the soapboxing, throughout the series. It's not so much that the author is trying to push a particular philosophy, like in the Sword of Truth books, it just feels like they're trying too hard to have "philosophical discussions" to the point that it feels forced and out of character, like everyone in this universe aspires to be a greek philosopher. And it does still feel like the author is frequently using characters as mouthpieces for his viewpoint: a lot of characters views have struck me as overly "modern". There's an awful lot of characters who are lionizing the virtue of skepticism or denouncing religion (and very few sympathetic characters espousing opposing viewpoints), for a world with pretty obvious supernatural elements. Or having very modern sounding views on governments and economics. Or even having straw-man debates about abortion, at one point.

Yeah, I've got pretty mixed feelings about the Malazan; I've been dragging through it at a pretty glacial pace, and I've rather stalled out in Book 7. I want to finish it, mostly out of sheer stubbornness, and not out of particular enjoyment. I loved the idea of fantasy on a truly epic scope, and Malazan delivers on that: gods and empires and ancient characters and characters of great power, that's all cool stuff. But what Malazan doesn't do a great job of delivering on just the basics of good storytelling, IMO. The stories are just all-over the place, the general format for each book is to have something like 3-6 unrelated (or very loosely related) story lines running at once, all of which converge in the last 10% of the book. And, sure that helps give it the "epic scope" but it makes the actual book feel scattered and unfocused. There's no elevator pitch for most of these books, no plot summary except "lots of things happen". And like Calderis says, the characters are all pretty static. They just don't get enough focus or screen-time for most of them to get developed. I'm seven books, and there's been a few dozen major characters, and only a tiny handful of those do I have much interest in, or care for. And at least for me, that's a big deal; a big epic story isn't that great if it's just a bunch of names of people that I don't care about, if there's very little of a human element to it. There are exceptions, there are characters that are done well, and parts of the plot that are done well. Books 2 (Deadhouse Gates) and 5 (Midnight Tides), for example, while still having several plot threads, manage to constrain their plot threads enough so that it feels like there's a mostly coherent plot to them: Deadhouse Gates centers around the story of a rebellion, and Midnight Tides is focused on a particular character enough to give it a bit of a through-line. The latter is probably my favorite book in the series. But I've found these to be the exceptions, not the rules, and overall it's just been a lot of dense plodding to get to those moments. One more complaint: it felt like there was a lot of, for lack of a better word, soapboxing, where it feels like the author is just putting their thoughts into the characters mouths to try to be "philosophical" or whatever. You'll have some random soldier on patrol with another soldier, and they'll start spouting talk like how "the deep underpinnings of society have lead to the empowerment of the current establishment leading to their current geopolitical situation which oppresses the masses". I'm being hyperbolic, naturally, but there were many conversations in each book where a character muses on some "deep topic" and it just ends up feeling, at best, somewhat unnecessary, and at worst out of character or even authorial tract, at some points.

Sorry, that was an attempt at humor that apparently swung and missed. I'd really like to defend the Last Airbender movie, because I'd really like it to be worth defending. (But it's not, so I can't)

I know this is crazy, but I'd like to defend the Last Airbender movie:

Yeah, both my fiancée and I do a lot of accidental whistling, a lot of opening the arrows/bows menus when we meant to open the shields/weapons menus (and vice versa), and at least twice I've broken a really nice sword by accidentally throwing it while fighting Ganon. Part of it is the controls being weird and just somewhat counter-intuitive, and I think part of it's just that I'm not very comfortable with the WiiU pad and don't think it's a particularly well designed controller. Personally, I'm hitting the point where the content is really feeling pretty same-y. Korok's feel like busywork, rather than anything interesting, only about half of the shrines are interesting puzzles, I'm really feeling the lack of enemy diversity. On paper, I'm still enjoying the game, but I feel it's slipped into skinner box territory, where I'm playing more out of sheer addiction of completionism and that "seeing numbers getting bigger" feeling, more than a deep enjoyment. (In related news, I still play Pokemon Go from time to time; despite how mechanically awful that game is) And I haven't even played that much of it. I've mapped five or six areas, done 30-40 shrines, haven't touched any of the dungeons, (but I have beaten Ganon, because I make somewhat poor life choices when it comes to games). There are some real gems in this game, some great puzzles, some really interesting challenges (I really liked Eventide Island, it was especially interesting since I'm only playing with 3 hearts), but those aren't the majority of my experience with the game.