wjs018

Hey man, I get it. I especially liked her uniform. The military uniforms in this show were stylish.

Trying to think of what my first anime crush was, I think it was probably Sailor Mercury. This probably has set me up for a lifetime of rooting for blue-haired heroines that will ultimately lose.

That's true! I hadn't thought about how silly that was until you pointed it out. Relena has a posse like she is some kind of Villainess.

Yes! I have a bit of a confession to make. I added the functionality to rikka to create the pinned post where she lists all the recent episode discussion threads because I am often a couple days late watching an episode, and I was having trouble finding old threads. So, I made it purely to help me go back into threads from a couple days ago to make a comment. I figured, if I was having trouble with it, other people probably were too.

Lol, Wu Fei is certainly one of the least likeable of the main set of pilots. I remember liking Duo a lot though, and Trowa wasn't bad despite his swept bangs look.

Weekly ranking roundup:

1. Anime Corner - Full Results - Weekly Winner: Re:Zero
2. Reddit Karma - Weekly Winner: Dan Da Dan

Credit to /u/Abysswatcherbel for making the chart for reddit karma and /u/Nooble5 for the Anime Trending chart.

It's been a whole year of posting in this community! It's hard to believe it's been that long. It feels like just yesterday that I created this account after the drama surrounding the defederation from the ml instance.

Something that I mentioned briefly in the post up above, but wanted to call out once more, is that hitagi might not be nearly as visible as I am in this community, but they actually do a lot behind the scenes to keep things running. In addition to everything involved with the infrastructure of running the instance, I was just looking through the reports I have received, and roughly half of them were resolved by hitagi prior to my ever seeing them. It also works out nicely that the two of us live on basically opposite sides of the globe, meaning that we have pretty good time zone coverage. So, even if they aren't posting as much as I am (I mean, who is really?), hitagi has been a vital part of keeping things running smoothly here.

As a sort of unofficial celebration of the anniversary, I am happy to do a kind of mini-AMA in this thread if people have any questions for me that are on their mind (either anime-related or not).

I do like how we are slowly building out our cast of other characters. However, I feel like the plot has mostly stalled? Like, we haven't seen any kind of mention of his terminal illness since episode 1. I was hoping that we would see more of him processing his impending death and the emotions that that would bring.

That new rod/reel cost ~850 USD. That is an insane amount to spend for a new angler that is deep in debt. I just looked up what an equivalent to my rod/reel costs today and came out to $120, and I have been using that for two decades at this point. I guess when you are doing saltwater fishing it would be more expensive, but that is still nuts. I guess when you know you only have two years left to live, might as well live it up?

Unrelated to isekai, but I saw from your site that you migrated from Wordpress to Hugo. What method did you use to do that? I have an old wordpress site that I keep running for somebody, but it isn't actively updated anymore. If I could convert that to static html and host it using something like github pages, that would be awesome. I looked into it once before, but there were a bunch of different plugins and methods, so the inertia of not doing it won out.

No big science section of the post today. Instead they brought together several of the scientific concepts they introduced earlier. See previous threads for my discussions on the astrolabe (tool used to measure the position of Mars in this episode), Ptolemy, and retrograde motion.

I found this episode to be surprisingly emotional for me. I don't think it is necessarily meant to be, but perhaps it was speaking to my inner scientist heart. Badeni's insatiable thirst for knowledge had led him close to self destruction. When Oczy walked in talking about documents that could change his life, Badeni almost let the stifling and punishment of his curiosity send Oczy away. However, his curiosity managed to keep just enough of a desire for knowledge lit inside him that he took a risk on what Oczy talked about. He came so close to letting the most momentous thing to ever happen in his life walk out the door. It also harkens back to Rafal's speech to Nowak, that the thing the church is trying to, and will fail to kill is curiosity and the desire for truth itself. Nowhere is that more evident than in Badeni.

One thing that I wish we had seen more of was Oczy's struggle to take that first Mars measurement. We see him facing a sky full of eyes and then cut to him having completed the task. I feel like there was likely a more meaningful struggle there. What was it that kept him there and helped him face his fears?

Their demonstration of how retrograde motion appears was fine I think. I am not sure it would really help people that don't have a grasp of it, but it's hard for me to put myself in those shoes at this point. I think they did do a pretty good job explaining retrograde motion and epicycles this episode and show how persuasive a "beautiful" theory can be. @rikka@ani.social

When I was in grad school, I was studying biophysics, but since I was in the physics department, I had to take classes in a broad range of topics including quantum and particle physics and many of my fellow cohort worked in particle physics and did stints working at the LHC. I remember having long talks with them about this theory or that theory of what could shake out after the LHC was powered on (super-symmetry and string theory were popular topics of the day). The general consensus among all of them was that the standard model had to be incorrect in some way. A non-insignificant reason for that was that it was too messy. It required caveats, corrections, assumptions, etc. that they didn't like and felt should not be needed in a more complete model. All that is to say that this sense of how "beautiful" a scientific theory is remains a powerful motivating factor for practicing scientists to this day. So, having two models that both work practically, but one is much more beautiful, people tend to go for the beautiful model/theory.

Speaking of beauty, this show continues with beautiful night sky shots. The end with Oczy being able to look at the night sky and find it beautiful was a really nice moment.

Absolutely! I was completely blown away by Bravern. One of the most fun series out there.

In addition to the already mentioned Sakuta from Bunny Girl and Rentaro from 100GF, there are a couple others that I like:

• Bravern - This one is two guys that are both strong-willed. Not really sure you can call this strictly a romance though considering all the robots and apocalypse.
• Endo and Kobayashi - This is actually two romances in one. One of them (in the game world) has an assertive male character. The other (in our world) a bit less so, but it was a great series that got majorly overlooked.
• Girlfriend, Girlfriend - You can call Naoya many things, but timid is not one of them.
• Love After World Domination - A criminally underwatched series that features the Red Ranger character falling in love at first sight, and he will strive to overcome all obstacles to make it happen.
• Tomo-chan Is a Girl - Jun might be dense, but he is a man of action.