Spoilers for Centaurworld Seasons 1 and 2! You should watch it if you’re gonna because I need to talk about it’s whole deal now that I’ve finished it. It’s worth your time, though maybe don’t get a Netflix subscription JUST to watch Centaurworld alone. Though, tbh, I wouldn’t regret spending my money to do just that. It’s up to you.
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The Disparity Is There For A Reason
It has been a long time coming, so long that I don’t know when or why I added it to My List on Netflix, but I finally started watching Centaurworld. I do remember that it got a bit of buzz when it first released, with people saying how unexpectedly good it was and how the visuals from the clips being shared didn’t really represent the show as a whole, but the furor subsided, I stopped watching things regularly, and now it’s 2026. I’m finally trying to get through the whole show before my Netflix subscription ends a few days after I’m writing this and it’s been surprisingly engaging. I mean, I expected to enjoy myself, given how much convincing I need before I’ll actually save a show on a streaming platform’s list thingy, but I didn’t expect to find such a neat little story wrapped up in the bright colors and over-the-top-but-not-quite-absurd silliness. I wasn’t entirely sure what I expected, to be honest. I mean, I thought there’d be some kind of framing narrative wrapped around the show to set up what I knew about it–a horse gets stuck in a magical world of centuars–but I didn’t expect the framing narrative to become the narrative. I expected some goofiness, but I didn’t expect songs ranging from second-hand-embarrassment-makes-this-difficult-to-watch to beautiful but uncanny forewarnings of something so dire and evil that it seems like it surely couldn’t exist in this chipper little show. I expected noodle-limbed, physics defying characters, but found myself in a world with a strong and coherent set of underlying rules that guided the way its denizens moved through it even if it was different from what I’d expected from a “standard” world. It really was an exepectedly interesting show for the first whole season and while I’m only a couple episodes into season 2, my hopes for it remain high.
Continue readingI Really Like Ninety-Nine Percent of Dandadan
In continuing my burgoening tradition of watching something new every week, I finally gave in to the cultural zeitgeist (which makes it sound like I was resisting the cultural zeitgeist but, to be honest, I was just ignoring it like I was ignoring every TV show and movie for the last couple years) and watched Dandadan. It’s been on my radar for a while, even if all I really knew about it was “there’s a supposedly old lady with tall hair who carries a metal baseball bat?” based on some images I’ve seen on the internet, but one of my friends told me it was actually a really cute love story in addition to the slightly-more action-y episode-to-episode events and I was sold. Who doesn’t want to see a cute love story these days? So I watched it with that in the forefront of my mind, got swerved almost immediately, and then swerved more and more as the first season played out. It was a wild ride, but now I’m a diehard fan and dying on the inside because I’ve got to wait who even knows how long for Season 3 to come out. I suppose I’m lucky in that I only started watching it after the second season had been released so at least I didn’t have season 1’s horrific cliffhanger dangling over me for months and months while I waited. Which, if I had to levy a criticism at the show, it would be the way they’ve chosen to pace things. Not every episode has problems with it, but there’s enough that I kept feeling like I was being jostled around by the ending theme of the show, which is too bad because the opening and closing themes of both seasons are great and the sort of thing I chose to watch each time. It didn’t really impact the quality of the show for me, but I also can’t imagine this show coming out on a weekly schedule and would have been infuriated multiple times if I’d been watching it one episode a week.
Continue readingDorohedoro Is The Weirdest Anime I’ve Ever Watched And Enjoyed
Lately, I’ve been making an effort to get into watching more stuff. Mostly because I bought a month of Netflix a few weeks back to watch Frieren with my siblings when they came to visit, but also because I need more variety in my life and watching something while doing a bunch of mindless crafting in Final Fantasy 14 makes the time pass better. It’s also kind of nice to not eat all my meals at my desk and instead eat some of them sitting on my couch, outside of my office, in a much more relaxed manner. Most of my meals at my desk are quickly consumed in order to get things out of the way so I can focus more completely on FF14, so being able to eat relatively laconicly while watching a TV show or something on my nice, 4K TV is refreshing. I haven’t had a Netflix subscription in a few months and I spent most of last year in a weird mood about watching things by myself, so I’ve been building up quite a list of things to watch on Netflix (a much larger list than I’d accumulate in a few months on account of not feeling like watching stuff for more than a year at this point). It took a bit to pick something since part of me wanted to dive back into the old familiar stuff, but I was brave (this is a joke) and pushed myself to watch something new, which is how I got started on the only (currently, at the time of writing this) available season of Dorohedoro. It’s a bit of an odd show, overall, and that weirdness starts with the show’s title card on Netflix. It claims to be about a guy trying to find the person who turned his head into a lizard’s head, and while that’s weird, it’s a pretty normal kind of weird. Once you start the show, though, it immediately ramps the weirdness up.
Continue readingI Finally Watched Frieren And I’ve Got A New Favorite Anime
Over my birthday weekend (a week and a half ago as I’m writing this), my friends introduced me to Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End, an anime that I’d heard about a while back but never really gotten around to watching. I’m terrible at watching things by myself, I’ll freely admit, but I almost watched Frieren back when I first heard about it because the premise of it was incredibly compelling to me. Frieren is an Elven mage who saves the world with her adventuring party and then goes on a personal journey afterwards only to discover upon her return that her treasured companions are not as immune to the passage of time as she is. A mere fifty years of idle spell collection was a lifetime for her friends and now she has to cope with not only the regrets she feels but how to live amongst humans who live, grow, and pass in so very little time. The anime has it all: the unintended consequences of power vacuums, repeating the mistakes of the past because humans don’t live on the same time scale as the demons they’ve been fighting, an ancient being struggling to answer the impossible questions of (effective) immortality, and a constant dose of heart and connection to tie it all together. Exactly my shit in ways I couldn’t anticipate before watching it, to the degree that it has probably become my favorite anime, supplanting Delicious In Dungeon from just last year.
Continue readingWrapping Up Fruits Basket
At far too late at night (an admittedly subjective time), I finished Fruits Basket with my friend. We started Season 2 a few weeks ago, but got caught up in it as the second season came to a close and wound up watching the last season of it in about a week as we crammed it all in before she and her husband would be entirely unavaiable due to traveling for a wedding. I was desperate to finish watching it, swept up in the story as I was, and she was willing to sacrifice sleep to share one of her favorite stories with me, so we burned the candle at both ends and now I’m at a loss for what to do with myself once again. Less so than with Final Fantasy 14, but, unlike Final Fantasy 14, I still find myself thinking “I can’t wait to watch more Fruits Basket” and then remembering that there’s no more for me to watch and getting utterly devastated as a result. I wouldn’t really compare the two since one is a video game that took me 1100 hours to get to the end of the first major story arc that has completely reshaped the way I spend my free time every single day and the other was a 60-some episode anime that took a few months to watch only because we took a bunch of time away after my friends went to Japan for their honeymoon and I got super caught up in Final Fantasy 14’s story line (which didn’t leave much room for anything else, especially during a period when I was so emotionally exhausted even before dealing with the emotional complexity of Final Fantasy’s story). Feeling at a loss after Final Fantasy 14’s story is a result of not just storytelling but the end of something I’ve been doing for half a year, but the feeling following Fruits Basket is entirely due to the strength of the storytelling, the memorability of the characters, and the uncompromising manner in which the truth of the characters is laid out by the end of the show.
Continue readingI Finally Watched Kiki’s Delivery Service And Spent Weeks Thinking About The Ending
After talking about it for a few years, I finally sat down with some friends to watch Kiki’s Delivery Service. Given that this is one of my friends’ favorite movie, I let her pick the version we watched and so we settled in to watch a high-quality VHS rip of the original US publication of the movie. My friend cited music and some artistic choices as the reason for this selection and I, who had a vague idea of what the movie was about (burnout/depression/growing up/loss of creative spark), went along with it. I’d never seen the movie. I didn’t have an opinion. I knew that a lot of people had very specific and very strong opinions, but I didn’t really know why. After watching the movie though, I kind of get it. The specific songs chosen back in the day lend a very particular feel to the movie and, since one of them is right near the start of it, I can understand how changing the song would change the tone of the movie rather strongly. I also understand that the decision to make the cat, Jiji, speak again at the end of the movie is important to a lot of people and that it significantly changes one of the final notes of the movie, not to mention how a viewer might feel as they watch the credits roll and move on with their life. I only very recently saw the movie for the first time, so it wasn’t a very formative experience for me and while I am tempted to see how the more recent edition of the movie feels with the altered music and a story that ends more closely aligned with its Japanese source, I don’t know that I want to spend another couple hours on it (this isn’t a statement about the quality of the movie or anything, just a reflection of that fact that I don’t like to rewatch movies in quick succession). I will probably watch the movie again someday and maybe then I’ll watch the more recent version just to compare how it feels, but I really don’t expect my opinion to change that drastically since most of how I feel about it has little to do with the song selection and more to do with how burnout and creative work is depicted.
Continue readingA More Civilized Age Pivots To KotOR 2 Due To Boycott Of Disney+
Last night (as of writing this and a bit over a week ago as of this being posted), A More Civilized Age announced that they would not be covering the second season of Disney’s Andor. According to the podcast episode (which appeared in their feed instead of the first episode of coverage that everyone was expecting) shared along by the social media posts, members of the podcast felt it would go against their moral and/or ethical beliefs to cover something on the BDS boycott list, which they’d just learned included Disney+ specifically. This recording specifices that this was a difficult decision for them to make given that the members of the podcast had differing views and that they had to make it in under a week since they only learned of the Disney+ boycott the week that the new season of Andor began streaming. It makes sense that they might struggle with this choice since their weekly coverage of the first season of Andor launched them into a position of relative fame that has contributed to their current success and included perks like being able to watch the final episode early in order to release their final episode of coverage at the same time that the season 1 finale aired. That said, it speaks to their strength of character and their overall morals that the eventual decision wasn’t to cover Andor season 2 without the members of the group who objected to breaking the boycott but to pivot to covering something that isn’t being boycotted.
Continue readingFriends At The Table Has Another New (And Delightful) Podcast: Side Story!
Once again, I am here to tell you about a brand new Friends at the Table podcast! I’ve written about Friends at the Table as a whole, with a focus on their tabletop gaming, and the second podcast they started in 2024, Media Club Plus, as it covers the 2011 anime Hunter x Hunter, but they just started somethig brand new a couple weeks ago (episode two came out the week this was posted). It’s a video game discussion podcast called “Side Story” and it is exactly what it sounds like. Austin Walker, noted video game journalist of quite a few places (perhaps most notably Waypoint back in the day), has apparently been getting requests from people for years to go back to talking about video games the way he used to before the career change that brought him to the now-closed Possibility Space video game studio. Now that he’s choosing to focus his time and energy on Friends at the Table, rather than continuing to keep it as a side project, he’s started this video game discussion podcast with a cast made up of other Friend at the Table folks. So far, he’s only had two other people join him for both of the podcast’s first two episodes (Jack de Quidt and Janine Hawkins, both people who have written for video games in the past), but Austin has been clear that he intends to have the rest of the Friends at the Table cast on at some point. Given that the whole premise of this particular video game podcast is to just talk about the games they have been playing, rather than seeking to provide stringent reviews or high-concept disucssions, it’s perfect for someone looking for a relaxing discussion of video games of all types (recent, older, indie, big-budget, etc) that ranges from the light “this was fun” to the critical “I played this but found the experience strange and possibly unpleasant” and even the hopeful “this game is promising a lot and seems to be actually delivering during its early access phase.”
Continue readingChoosing Joy While Listening To NADDPod
One of the podcasts I listen to regularly, NADDPod (AKA, Not Another D&D Podcast), recently started their fourth season (or main campaign, I guess? Though they have talked about changing up the format to do fewer long campaigns and more shorter ones, which really kind of muddies the waters). After all these years of games–main campaigns, side games, mini-arcs, and one-shots–the final member of the group has taken the lead and run not just a one-shot or a mini-arc like most of the others have, but stepped up to run the next main campaign for group. The one guy in the group who hasn’t technically sworn to never run a campaign but has expressed extreme trepidation about it and about not knowing the game well enough to run things has finally stepped out from behind the character sheet and taken a seat behind the GM’s screen. This guy, Jake Herwitz, has always been funny and a great performer (and is, in fact, one of the original founders of the podcast company that NADDPod is a part of), but I was a bit nervous at the thought of him taking over. After all, I hadn’t really seen any of his independent creative work, or anything he’d done outside of the podcast. I had no idea what it was that he would bring to the show that the others didn’t do just as well if not better. Having listened to a few episodes, though, I am happy to say that all of my fears were completely wrong and he’s doing a better job than I ever imagined he could. He might even wind up being my favorite GM for this group, in fact, if he manages to stay the course for his entire run.
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