Day 32 AHHHHHHHHH SORRY QUICK POST I'M LITERALLY IN PUERTO RICO

Yeah so uhhhhhhhh...




I only have access to wi-fi through a hot spot we can only access for "official business" so like some of the work I have as our team's Diversity Point of Contact (Yeah wrap your head around that, no time to explain! Next time!!) So I just had to email something so here I am urgently using this at 12am.

So I'm in Puerto Rico, our team is living under industrial sized bleachers, but it's comfy. We're combined with two other teams, and we're going to mix, so it's just like being on the first floor of the dorms back in Vicksburg. I've been here three days, it's rained heavily at least once a day, almost always in the afternoon very strangely enough. It's beautiful here, we're on the West Coast of the island, based in Aguada but also working in Anasco and Mayaguez, under a non profit called "Somebody Cares Puerto Rico." The work is manageable and relatively short hours, but unpredictable. Every day has been completely different, but it's an adventure for sure. I'm trying to take as many photos and even videos as I can, I'll send them all through here at SOME point, but I can't guarantee when. I THINK that's adequate information besides all the other details. I'm well, I'm actually pretty damn happy I have no reasonable access to wi-fi, not even on my phone (I almost couldn't share on Facebook where I was!) It just sucks for this blog, but again I'll try to document as much as I can.

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Yup I'm still gonna talk about anime though HAW HAWWWWW, since I just GOTTA mention the new shows I picked up and will finish long past the time I'll be here. But I want to say first of all, I finished Apache Yakyugun, I really enjoyed it. It sagged for me in the third quarter, just a LITTLE boring at points, but virtually every game they played was gripping, especially the last one WOW! I will be talking about it in depth in the near future for sure.

So I started a new QUAD, unfortunately I can't for the life of me tell you what connects these four beyond episode length and general priority with which I wanted to see them. I'm 7 eps into all of them, the first one is Dennou Coil; a sci-fi school mystery adventure with holograms and integrated virtual reality. It's really smart and VERY well animated (though can't say I like the color palette that much), but admittedly I'm not taking to the protagonist all that much. She's more of a proxy for the audience and so far has very little agency or reason to be involved. That's not SO much of a problem, the other characters are fairly strong, but it's kind of awkward when you have those characters and you ask "Why aren't THEY the main character really?"
The second is Fantastic Children, and true to it's name it's Faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaantastic lmao It's got a very similar vibe to Monster actually, very classical ornate soundtrack and tense mysterious atmosphere, only it seems to be in an amalgamated setting of modern day, 20th century Europe, and straight up fantasy. I think everything to do with the children themselves is riveting, but it's couched in this narrative centering around basically the same dynamic as Conan and Lana from Future Boy Conan? Only this Lana's super aloof "chosen-one"y and the Jimsy parallel is closer to her. And I guess it has mechs now? It's super unorthodox, it's by the same creator as Catnapped which from what I've seen is a WEIRD film.
The third is Eccentric Family, a critical darling of the modern anime community. And I like it so far, it definitely got it's footing as of episode 6 and 7, before that someone came up to me today asking what show I was watching, and I honestly couldn't accurately describe it. It's about a pack of Tanuki? But also Tengu, like sentient crows? But also one of them was a human who trained to be a Tengu and now wants to eat the main character Tanuki because she likes him so much? It's not particularly anything really, not that FUNNY, not that DRAMATIC, not exactly "slice-of-life," this author who wrote is this so off kilter to me, seriously. But I dig it, I can actually start to see where the "Family" part of Eccentric Family comes into play. The writing is really relaxing and charming, I'm pretty settled in with all the characters, and P.A Works did a fine job with it too, looking forward to more.
The last one is...the sandbag of the QUAD unfortunately. For those who don't know, the "sandbag" or punching bag is what I've been calling the one entry in the QUAD that I like the least, to where I'm specifically not enjoying it too much. It really had me at the start, but even just FIVE episodes in, not even seven, I'm not digging BECK as much as I wish. Goodness that OP and ED does this show too much justice. Beck is the first show to get pushed down to meh based almost totally on production values. This is a fairly shoddy production so far. VERY bland colors, redundant and cost saving story boarding (like this song at the end of ep 5 which is just over two looping gifs), weird overanimation like lots of fidgeting, face twitching and generally distracting movement, often off model or just dead fish faces. The CG on the guitars and when they play said guitars is really not terrible but clearly they couldn't animate those scenes well enough without it, so it comes off as a crutch. The only remarkable element is the details in the posters, shirts, branding etc, but even that's on fairly unremarkable digipaint era BGs. I'm not even a big fan of the music so far apart from the OP and ED (which, again, slay, wow), almost all of it has been very cringe Engrish, which I'm normally a sucker for, but none of it has grown on me, and no I'm not even gonna try hearing how the english dub fares. This director is a piece of work I'll tell ya, once I found out it was the Gurren Lagann episode 4 guy? It was too noticeable. And I'm only being too harsh on the production because I don't think the story and characters have given me much of anything to go off of. Five episodes in and the band has not been formed, there's a weird romance thing that I think is just gonna get in the way in the long run, and just none of the characters have come off as all that appealing to me. They show all these rock musicians in the ED, and all of them are oozing more personality than anyone in this cast. And that especially sucks given how literal S-tier Beck's OP is, you can't get more charming than having your characters sing your OP with perfect lip sync. But you can't get more disappointing than going from THAT OP to whatever shoddy bulk of a show I got here. Nana, DMC, DJ Agetarou, hell Legend of Black Heaven are all running laps around this show.
Fantastic Children > Eccentric Family > Dennou Coil >> Beck :P

Not gonna do the one rec thing this time though, sorry! And I think that's all I got! Can't exactly DM frequently but I'll check every so often! Let everyone know! Bye bye!