I know I have posted about it before, but my favorite manga adaptation is The Eminence in Shadow. The LN and the manga have quite different tones. The manga is extremely silly, more like a gag series than anything else. While the novels retain a more serious dark fantasy vibe.

The two have such different vibes that it has caused problems for the series at times. I remember when the anime started airing (back when I was still on reddit), tons of people that had only read the manga were upset with how serious the show was (episode 1 was especially so), expecting something more like chuuni-Konosuba because that is what the manga is like.

I adore all three versions of TEIS (they are the only LNs I own the physical copies of), but they can all be quite different from each other at times. The LNs are medieval dark fantasy with the occasional chuuni-humor of Cid injected into them. The manga is straight gags from cover to cover where the rule of cool trumps everything else. Finally, the anime probably strikes the balance between the two, inventing whole new visual gags that only work in animation, and bringing the setting to a more industrialized era. I think it is a success story in allowing flexibility when adapting a story to fit the medium that other creators could learn something from.

A while back, I read and loved Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, so thought I would check out more of Philip K. Dick’s work. I then read Ubik and was confused as hell most of the time. I haven’t read any other of his stuff since then though. I might have to check out some of his alternate history scifi works like this one.

To start with, I will point to my list of sci-fi books I listed out last time. Other normie books I have thoroughly enjoyed over the years:

• Hitchiker’s Guide Series - An absolute classic. I read the first book as assigned reading back in school and then went on to plow through all the rest because I enjoyed it so much.
• Catch 22 - This book is one that I didn’t fully appreciate it way back when I read it, but over time it has stuck in my brain and I have come to appreciate its brand of absurdity more and more.
• Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman - This is an autobiographical work by Richard Feynman, a famous physicist of the 20th century. If you saw the movie Oppenheimer, he was the one that played the bongos and watched the Trinity test from behind the car windshield. Both of those stories are in the book!
• Don Quixote - Often called the first modern novel, this stands as one of my favorites. I found it genuinely hilarious. It almost reads like it a long series of Monty Python sketches featuring the same character.

Reading the blurbs on their site, I think that is where the seeds are sewn, but it doesn’t become official until later (though it is pretty clear that is where things are headed).

Yeah, I don’t want to oversell it, but I enjoyed it. It was a good mix of wholesome, fluffy romance, dungeon building and development, and then some good battling action. If I could change one thing about it, I wish that it didn’t go down the harem route later in the series. However, that is largely because the first couple is just so dang cute.

Now I’m a Demon Lord! Happily Ever After with Monster Girls in My Dungeon - Vol. 10

I have read a lot of the WN version of this story and enjoyed it a lot. Based on the synopsis for this volume, this is about as far as I got before running out of translated chapters way back when. I have also read part of the manga adaptation, and it is fine.

Obligatory shoutout to !anime@ani.social if you want a more anime-focused discussion. Of what I have watched (or seen enough of to make a judgement) there are a couple standouts. Note that I haven’t really watched much western animation in recent years.

• Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End - !frieren@ani.social
• The Apothecary Diaries
• Heavenly Delusion
• Delicious in Dungeon - !dungeonmeshi@ani.social - This one is done by Studio Trigger, so it is a bit stylized, but I adore the animation in this series
• Jujutsu Kaisen - I haven’t watched this, but I have only seen tremendous praise for season 2’s animation (despite the studio’s working conditions)
• Demon Slayer - another show I haven’t watched, but have seen plenty of gorgeous clips

Wildcard answer would be Star Wars Visions. Each episode is done by a different animation studio, so it can be up to personal preference as to which ones you like, but there are some great showcases in the show.

Edit: If you care a lot about animation quality, I would recommend checking out the SakugaBlog. It goes into deep dives on Japanese animation. For example, they did a whole running series on Frieren (link to the first article).

A lot of the anime-related communities have consolidated over time to the ani.social instance. There are historical reasons for this (largely due to hostility from the ml admins), and if you want a brief history for just the general anime community, I previously wrote a post here.

That being said, the ani.social instance has been growing with new communities being added. Here are the more active ones:

General Communities

• !anime@ani.social
• !manga@ani.social
• !lightnovels@ani.social

Series-Specific Communities

• !dungeonmeshi@ani.social - Delicious in Dungeon community
• !frieren@ani.social - Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End community
• !nokotan@ani.social - My Deer Friend Nokotan community (currently airing show)
• !dandadan@ani.social - Dan Da Dan community (show airs this fall)
• !dragonball@ani.social - Dragonball community

Misc.

• !vocaloid@ani.social - Very new community just started by @hisao@ani.social about vocaloids. Check it out!
• !vtubervids@ani.social - Community to discuss and share videos from and about vtubers
• !seiyuu@ani.social - Community about Japanese voice actors behind the scenes

A couple fandom communities:

• !nokotan@ani.social - Currently airing show, has weekly discussion threads
• !dandadan@ani.social - Show that will be airing this fall, has threads for manga chapters
• !frieren@ani.social - Show that aired a couple months back, currently mostly fanart posts
• !dungeonmeshi@ani.social - Show that aired a couple months ago, currently mostly fanart posts
• !seiyuu@ani.social - Community to discuss Japanese anime voice actors behind the scenes and share clips

This is an excellent point that I thought about when a previous community I was active in got shut down on the ml instance due to some admin whims. Since then, for the two communities I run, I have an external wiki that I maintain with things like complete rules or an index of past weekly discussion threads, etc. These wikis are set up on a VPS that I am responsible for, independent of the host instance of my communities.

ani.social and the admin, @hitagi@ani.social, has been excellent, and the instance is a logical place for anime/manga communities. I have also tried to keep up donations to keep the server running, but people’s lives change, not always by choice. Having some form of communication independent of the lemmy instance makes sense for those scenarios, if for nothing else except for communicating a migration to a different instance.

I am not going to be able to watch the second half, but this start has been brutally slow. I am watching in the US on Fox and the commentators have struggled to find things to talk about. At different points they have talked about the grounds crew, tea cups, and the Copa America instead of this game. If England has any hopes of making a run in this tournament, they are going to need to make some changes, up the tempo, and find some urgency.

Really lackadaisical start to this game so far. At least when England played Denmark they came out strong before they got lazy. This game they just started that way.

Overall, this game was kind of disappointing with relatively few good chances at goal from open play (especially compared to the other Group D match). The equalizer came from a penalty that will be sure to spark discussion going forward. At the end of the day, France looked their best when they were playing quickly and vertically. They struggled to generate chances when they couldn’t use their pace against the Polish defense. Lessons to take with them as they advance.

I can’t stand when penalty takers do those inconsistent runs up to the ball just to try to bait the keeper. Aren’t there rules about that kind of thing? Feel for the French keeper on this one.

Yeah, France has looked better in the second half. Attacking with pace that the Polish defense has struggled with.

At the half:

I tuned in about 10 minutes through the half once I grabbed some lunch. I have been watching France play through this tournament and they haven’t seemed like they particularly found their groove yet. At least, they seem a pale imitation of the French team that showed up in the World Cup. I had thought it was maybe due to Mbappe being sidelined so far. However, with him on the pitch this game, they have largely struggled to break through the Polish defense (until the last ~5 minutes or so).

There just hasn’t been too much movement off the ball for France, creating space for their play makers to work through the Polish defense. France has looked better on the fast break than when they try to build it up because they have struggled to get through the back line of Poland after they get their lines set up. There were a couple minutes there at the end of the half where France started playing some quick give and go’s and were able to spring some players behind the back line to make the Polish goalkeeper come up with some good reflex saves.

As for Poland, I think they should be fairly happy with their performance so far. They have mostly managed to contain some of the French play makers while having a couple good looks at goal on the break. Something to watch out for, and they almost got caught out, is that they don’t over commit forward and have things turn into a footrace toward their own goal after a turnover.

The French team of the last five minutes of the half looked way better than the rest of what I watched, so I think they should look to emulate those quick passes and through balls to try to break through Poland as their big, lofted crosses haven’t had shown too much promise yet.

Filterable post flairs and instance-agnostic links are my two biggest wish list items that I think would go a long way to making that specific community much nicer (speaking as a mod).

Good eye! I had seen this question and spent way too long looking very closely and only able to make out a couple letters. Here is the exact design on Etsy I found.

Thank you!

The project relies on extensions that are installed separately to pull content from different services (mangadex, mangaplus, etc.). The other day, the tachiyomi devs removed almost all the extensions that they were hosting/maintaining after a threat of legal action from a Korean webtoon company. Here is a relevant discussion thread.