I’ve been slacking on my anime goal recently, and since I’m still comfortably ahead of pace with manga, I decided to shift priorities a bit.

First up, I watched all of かぐや様は告らせたい season 2, plus the two episodes of season 3 that have aired so far. I’ll be following this one week-to-week from here on. I’m really glad this one is on Crunchyroll finally; the only reason I hadn’t watched it already is because Funimation is a hassle. There are still bits that get away from me but compared to season 1 (which I felt was pretty well above my level at the time) it feels much more within my grasp.

I kept up with my current shows (Spy Family ep. 2 and 阿波連さんははかれない ep. 3) and they were both just as good as ever. Gave 可愛いだけじゃない式守さん ep. 1 a try and it was…fine. Production value is good and fortunately the annoying repetition from the manga is gone, but it’s not all that interesting and understanding it is effortless so I might drop it if the 妹 isn’t feeling like continuing. Also watched ep. 1 of であいもん which, I’d watch just for the 京都弁 if that was the only thing it had going for it (it’s not).

My long-awaited サマータイムレンダ started airing this week and of course thanks to Disney it’s not available anywhere but Japan. I managed to get my hands on ep. 1 anyway and spent a few hours making my own (english) subtitles so I could watch it with my sister. Usually I wouldn’t count subtitled anime but I think an exception can be made when you literally make them yourself. It’s a really good adaptation so far. The actress playing Mio is 和歌山出身 and her performance is great; I’ve been looking forward to hearing the dialect spoken and I’m very happy with the result.

Lastly, I picked up ダンベル何キロ持てる？ on a whim and have watched two episodes now. I wasn’t expecting much from it but it’s pretty funny and seems to have some decent advice about strength training so I’ll be keeping at it. I’ve been meaning to get back in shape lately anyway.

For manga, I read 怪物事変 vol. 4, which finished out an arc about Shiki’s childhood and gave him some nice character development. He’s been kind of the boring Bakugo character from the beginning but I think we’re past that now (nice!). Also read からかい上手の高木さん vol. 5 one night when I’d been busy all day and just needed to speed through something to check in for the day.

I’ve had Orange (the whole series) on my backlog for actually years at this point and I decided to finally get to it. I read this really slowly and I wish I could figure out why. Part of it might be that I combined all six volumes into one ebook and it’s discouraging to see the slow progress through the whole thing, but even when I’m not paying attention to that I find myself taking a long time to make much progress.

Lastly, 東京卍リベンジャーズ vol. 27 came out this week so naturally I snapped it up and read it in like an hour. Time for more waiting.

Finally, I finished 愚者のエンドロール (reading along to the audiobook). While my initial impression of this one was not very good I have to say I ended up enjoying it more than 氷菓 so maybe I will pick up the next book in the near future. Compared to 青春ブタ野郎 there was definitely a lot more that I didn’t catch, and I got lost much more often (mostly when I would see an unfamiliar word and get distracted). Regardless, I think the narration was the key factor in my increased enjoyment level this time around. In particular, the author’s writing style leads to a lot of sentences that I would have had to do a double-take on in order to get the right meaning, but being able to hear the intonation eliminated that problem. Another success for the readalong method.