rinkafushi

Look, I'm late to this. More than "15 minutes late with Starbucks" late. Like, "several months late with no excuse" late. Well, maybe some excuses - the package arrived to my home address shortly after Christmas break, so I only got my hands on it  a few weeks later when my mom stopped by for a short "are you still alive" visit. Because I've also been sick twice in between. Kid germs are lethal, folks. ANYWAY!! I opened the package in early February and it's never too late for a post I guess! Because hamsterwoman truly outdid herself as a santa, as per usual!

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If I'm honest, this post is going up primarily because I'm a completionist (sometimes, at least), and because in the day and age of online tickets, I'd otherwise actually forget what I've watched in a year. Especially if the years keep feeling both longer and shorter, with So Much^TM going on that it becomes hard to keep anything straight. Anyways, here go the movies I've seen at the cinema this year, a year that had me live in three different places thanks to the lovely teacher assignment system in BY <3


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I am late to post this, and for that, I apologise. Both the lovely letter from cyanshadow (reply is on its way!!!) and the amazing parcel from lightofthewind arrived just in time for German Christmas (24th Dec)! Being majorly stressed out since pretty much early November, they were things I very much looked forward to unpacking right on the 24th (my first day of break), and unpack I did~ But then I fell ill right after the holidays and my brainspace went ???? so here we are.... almost two weeks late without Starbucks bc my stomach still objects... But enough with the whining, LOOK AT ALL THE THINGS!!

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Somehow, this year has felt both shorter and longer than any others in recent memory - in between switching between three schools and daily covid regulation changes, health helter skelters and family joys and tragedies, a lot happened, and yet everything was always so much I barely had time to process it all. Travel this year was hashtag cancelled apart from three days in Rome with my mother and a training exercise week in the Spessart (debatable on the vacation ranking bc it was a lowkey bootcamp at times), but I did enjoy hosting friends coming by and exploring my region with them, of course.

But yeah, all this also contributed to how much new content I read or watched. But a tradition is a tradition, so here goes...

(And yes, I'm aware the year is not over yet, but not much could/will get added here - the new Spiderman and Matrix are coming out still, but idk if or when I'll see them, sooo.)

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1. Comment to this entry saying 'SNOW!' and I will pick 3 of your icons/userpics.
2. Make an entry in your own journal (or just reply if you prefer) and talk about the icons I picked!

Courtesy of aletheiafelinea, here be some explanations:


One of my oldest user pics still in use, first added when I still had a different account. Going by the fact that it's a Black Butler character, I'm guessing I added it to the roster around 2010 when I first watched/read the series and went on a hunt for some user icons :D The character in question was an early favourite of mine, an obfuscatingly ever-smiling Chinese mafia overlord with dubious allegiances who hits several of the character tropes I tend to gravitate towards. I don't remember where this panel is from in the manga as that's an unusual expression for him, but it is my go-to for more D: mood comments/posts.


Oh, CSI: Vatican :') :') How do I even explain this series... Basically, Vatican Miracle Examiners is a series of Japanese novels about, well, two priests who get sent by the Vatican to examine alleged miracles world-wide. Sounds harmless enough, until you hear that the case in the first novel turns out not to be a virgin conception but a cult of Nazis in South America pretending to be Catholics and raising Hitler's kids  via brainwashed surrogate mothers and dealing drugs ┐(‘～`；)┌ And it only gets more insane from there! (One time the solution is literally "It was cocaine", idk what to tell you.) The series got an anime adaptation in 2017 that had the budget of 200 yen and a potato, crammed 3 500-page novels into 10 25-minute episodes and consequently felt like getting whacked in the face with a sparksnotes summary written by someone high on meth. So of course I had a GREAT TIME with it :D Sadly, the 200 yen and a potato budget means that there's barely any material for icons to work with, so this coverart for the soundtrack was the closest I could get in terms of an ~aesthetic~ icon, so I have one to use for any topics that may involve religious stuff.


Rin Setsu A is a horrible, horrible goose of a character, but a very entertaining horrible goose :'D While Thunderbolt Fantasy due to its super detailed puppet designs doesn't lend itself to icon-making, the official 4-panel-comics the production team posted on social media had some quality illustrations to use, so I went for this one radiating peak "I had nothing whatsoever to do with this problem that just came to pass, I just happened to arrive at the scene while everyone was already on fire, I swear :3c"-energy.

I came home on this impromptu visit to a surprise package - it was labeled and packaged so professionally that I was like?? Did I forget I ordered something online???? But turns out no - just my santa sephystabbity doing a stellar job at being a santa! :D
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I guess it was inevitable that I'd end up sick on NYE in this year of years, because of course. So seeing as I'm not currently taking a last year walk with my friend in the snowy winterlandscape, I might as well put up the yearly media review post, brief as it is. So here we go!



Movies at the Cinema

Looking back, I'm surprised I managed to see this many movies at the cinema, to be honest - although more than half of the trips happened before Corona really hit Germany, to be fair.
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Anime

You'd think that in a year I spent half of binned at home, I'd watch a lot of anime, because I'm a weeb. But nope, in fact, I probably saw fewer anime than ever since starting watching shows by the season :') For one, nothing really good came out in the first 3/4 of the year, and then, I also just.... brainspace whomst?
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Mixed Media

I spent way too much time this year on YouTube, honestly. D'Angelo Wallace is probably the one who got most of my watch minutes, along with Eldena Doublecast whom I quote daily, pretty much (and honestly wHO WOULDN'T) - while cleaning this place top to bottom, I think I listened to his Msscribe video three times. I didn't make a dent in my Audible library as much, for some reason - I did finish that godawful Victim 2117 and rather whacky Speaking in Bones in fall during my move, and I also got a freebie for my birthday in Trophy by Steffen Jacobsen, which turned out to be pure "There's a lot to unpack here, so let's throw out the whole suitcase". Had not Victim 2117 been THAT MUCH WORSE, SOMEHOW, this one might have gotten an entry of its own (let's just say it's pure edge, and by edge I mean garbage).

I also picked up some new True Crime podcasts - Zeit Verbrechen, which is pretty good at focussing on larger systemic issues rather than single cases, Stern True Crime, which is pretty basic, Bear Brooks, which was very touching but also made me go somewhat :') at the prospect that we are becoming increasingly easy to identify thanks to people using all those ancestry geneology lab services, Dirty John, which is super biased storytelling, which in itself is fascinating, and Uncover, which tries to be less biased, but still makes you go HMMM at times.

Thoroughly disappointing were the serials Abgrund and Fremdgänger, which I was advertised to via the Zeit podcast. They were claiming to be a new form of entertainment, and I expected it would be Welcome to Nightvale-ish - a story told in the form of a podcast, which sounds like an interesting way to use storytelling. Instead, they were just very cringy radio plays, one playing all the greatest hits of And Then There Were None-type island mysteries, the other being a very "How do you do fellow kids?"-take on the activists involved in the Hamberger Forst situation. Neither used the medium in any meaningful way, suffered from awkward voice acting and trope-heavy script. Both had queer storylines be a central focus, so I guess that was why they claimed it was all super modern.

I also rediscovered an old Amazon wishlist from like 2011, and that I had jotted down Zombiepowder., Kubo's first serialised manga, on there, and bought the volumes second-hand in German. I had read it online back in the day, and remembered the ending as super jarring, but as I re-read it, it seemed much more like an episodic, but nevertheless satisfying story. I still very much love C.T.'s character (not surprising, given he clearly is a prototype for Gin and Aizen - yes, both of them), and how Kubo manages to make his worldbuilding vivid by small, artistic touches. It was nostalgic, but also bittersweet, given how lackluster his current manga (which he gets to do seasonally), Burn The Witch, turned out to be. Aaah, the good old days.

The Jump manga app also had me pick up Monster #8 by chance, and I am super glad I did - the series is clearly very Onepunch Man inspired, and I mean that in the best way. I'm all for more adult protagonists who put their own unique skills accumulated over years to use getting some shounen power up that allows them to become, well, protagonists. Kafka is a fun main character, and I'm here for all the hot-headed teenagers decididing to stan, bc #same.

Also a manga I picked up on the app (although I had to read the 100-ish chapters in between on... other sites) was Hell's Paradise/Jigokuraku. This one starts out being 150% pure edge, but with very stylish art and a unique approach to eldritch horror (the first day on the island? pure nightmare fuel), so it kept me going. The edgelord layer does slowly peel off to give way to some very fun and endearing characters as the show becomes more team-up-battle focussed. In particular Shion and his adopted daugther are characters I'm now constantly on edge about - if they die, I WILL write a strong letter to the editor. Or something. D:< To give you an idea how much this series drew me in - I ended up reading a good 15 chapters in Brazilian Portuguese just to catch up. How did I do that? It's a mystery. And involved lots of squinting and crying.

EDIT: I cannot believe I had to reminded to include the best shounen manga I read this year, which is in fact a webtoon parody about American Cartoon characters named Scoob and Shag. My friend made a great PPP about why it's grand. What starts out as crude parody about cartoons and creepypasta somehow develops worldbuilding more thought-out and interesting than most run-of-the-mill shounen, and you can tell the author has a lot of fondness for the classics of the genre, and manages to use the characters initially functioning as joke vehicles for actually emotional plot lines. It's a trip and a half, and one I absolutely recommend if you've ever liked a battle-oriented series!

EDIT 2: I also cannot believe I forgot to name Gogol - Chroniken der Finsternis which I made my poor friends watch with me. As someone only minimally acquainted with Russian literature (not the song) and folklore, I was free to enjoy the trainwreck unfold, and unabashadly enjoy the good parts (Russian Lestrade and the honest to god porn filler episode). 10/10 would do again

A few weeks ago, my mom let me know that a letter arrived for me, and I was like yes Santa Exchange!!! Will open that one as soon as I come by next week!!!! And then I got quarantine-binned :< Now finally at home for Christmas, I had the unadulterated joy of discovering just how much thought, care and kindness dear lunasariel poured into this:

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