Hey! Muffins are great but I must say I'm not entirely good at telling them apart from cupcakes. Chocolate ones are the best, no matter the presentation.
There are two main differences between muffins and cupcakes. First and foremost the density. Muffins have the density of bread, while cupcakes have the density of cake. Secondly is the icing on cupcakes, although it's still technically a cupcake without icing, and adding icing to a muffin doesn't make it a cupcake.
Now seriously, I just noticed your thread today, which speaks volumes of how out of touch I'm with the forum; due to my growing disinterest mostly caused by life and also getting more in Twitter mood. I'd like to come here more regularly, will at least try.
There's a delicate sort of balancing act between staying focused, being selective with your time, and keeping things interesting. There's a tendency to succumb to a form of doom scrolling where we may just peruse threads only mildly entertained or somewhat bored and loose a lot of time. I just always try to maintain some initiative by having ideas about how to make my time here fun and interesting. Which threads to read, what group activities to participate in, and what threads to make.
Not watching much anime the last few years. I follow Yuru Camp's season releases religiously and currently having some fun with the questionable energy of The elusive samurai. I've been more clearly into movies. What about you?
Did you get a chance to watch Frieren? That blew up more than anything else last season. I mean, on anilist there was no one who wasn't watching it. I don't know if you saw the Jobless Reincarnation series, that was very popular, but it was like they took that, cut out all the bad stuff, and refined the good. Probably the best Fantasy anime I've seen since Berserk.
One scene in particular is just the most briliant interaction between a 1,000 year old elf and a demon. I could see the mind games that went on during their duel, but it was their conversation that excited me the most. It's also a very melo series with a lot of relaxing scenes and slice of life mixed in with action and adventure. It's a very pure fantasy setting, doesn't muck anything up but just portrays everything like elves, dragons, and dwarves in their ideal classic sense. One thing that's done very well is the detachment an elf that lives for thousands of years feels towards humans who have very brief lives by comparison.
Well, I hadn't watched much anime for a while because I've been watching so much anime for so many years that I'm pretty aware of everything that exists and have seen everything that interests me. Not quite, but it just gets harder and harder to find something to watch. So I hadn't watched much anime for 2-3 years, and decided to see what came out and dig a bit deeper for obscure gems. I watched pretty much everything that interested me that had released during that "hiatus" and found some stuff that I couldn't even find online (at least with English subtitles) before. Obscure stuff gets uploaded to the internet gradually.
The most obscure anime I saw was Spirit of Wonder, a few OVA's about a beautiful young woman, a mad scientist, his assistant, and their wild experiments.. In terms of seasonals, Wonder Egg Priority stood out to me. It had one of the most fascinating protagonists, and did a bit of magical girl genre reconstruction. It kinda felt like Puella Madoka with realistic characters instead of moe. The Apothecary Diaries was surprisingly intelligent sort of Sherlock Holmes set in ancient Japan. A Sign of Affection was an adorable romance with a deaf main character, though I haven't finished it. Bocchi the Rock also seemed to kinda take the world by storm, a music themed anime about an all girl rock band. I expected Bocchi to be overhyped, but I was pleasantly surprised. Oshi no Ko was a combination of reincarnation and idol culture. Tengoku Daimakyo was an exciting action thriller post-apocalyptic sci-fi with a very unique gender situation. Don't want to spoil anything :P.
What really stood out to me with these over the vast majority of what comes out these days is that the dialogue, characters, and plots didn't rest heavily on tropes. You've seen one reincarnated in a fantasy world, you've seen them all.
But yeah, in like three months I doubled the number of anime I had tracked on anilist. 295 completed, but I probably spent more time searching for anime than I actually spent watching it. Gotta do a top 100 anime list at some point. Since then I've started watching more live action movies again, and playing video games. I've been playing a lot of Enlisted, a free to play ww2 Battlefield style shooter with objectives and whatnot. I focus mostly on tanks, and do a fair bit of research into ww2 tank tactics. It's got a very satisfying and immersive tank experience, though the game mainly focuses on infantry. And yesterday I just started getting into a MUD called Legends of the Jedi, so that may take over a chunk of my life for a while. :P
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