Once again it's time for a slow-moving midway update on my early impressions . We're well intothe dog days of summer and here in Toronto the annoying heat is lingeringfar longer than it ought to, which doesn't make me enthused withthings . Thishas been a season where I've been grumpy with perfectly good shows, orat least perfectly ordinary ones. On the other hand, there's an amazingwinner here.

Great:

• Thunderbolt Fantasy : Here is something that I

My bike club has been going paperless for some years now, increasingly shifting from printed cuesheets tohaving GPS route maps from ridewithgps be the authoritative version of a ride. I've been a paper holdout butthis clearly wasn't tenable for ever, and so recently I decided to dealwith the issue by getting a GPS unit. After a bunch of reading on theInternet, I ended up buying a Garmin Edge 820. The short version of thisreview is that I wound up returning it as somewhere

This time around, my early impressions have been delayed not justbecause I'm slow to write these up but also because I really don'tknow how I feel about a bunch of the shows in this season and I wantedto watch more episodes to try to figure it out. My first episodetakes were reasonably optimistic, but thenmy gut started sending out various warning signs and I've wound up ina surprisingly grumpy mood with currently airing shows, the kind ofmood where I start aggressively trimming the

As before I've decided to collect here allof my tweeted reactions to the first episodes I've seen (in the orderI saw them).

• DAYS episode 1: That was a reasonably fun and appealing instance ofits genre, although its genre is not particularly my thing. ♯

• Tales of Zestiria the X episode 0: This was pretty decent by itself butthe end sequence suggests that this was all background. →

• Taboo Tattoo episode 1: The writing is embarrassingly clumsy but theshow might be an okay

Once again it's time for my usual look backat what I watched this past season to see how my early impressions and my midway views held up.As always, I write these partly because they keep me honest and partlybecause it's interesting to go back later and see how I was feelingabout a show at the time.

Fully enjoyable:

• Flying Witch : This wasn't grand and ambitious the way some othershows were and it's not flawless, but Flying Witch totally andabsolutely nailed

Copied from Twitter becauseI don't to have it swallow my (pseudo) blogging ( as noted ):

My hot take as a consumer of translation: it's possible for atranslated term to be accurate & faithful and also be a badtranslation.

It can even be a bad translation if the word of god from the creatoris 'this is what it's supposed to be in English'.

A great exhibit for 'the word of the creator is sometimes wrong' isthe official title romanization

I rambled a bit about this on Twitter, but I want to put this downin a more durable (and slightly longer form). So:

@thatcks :An obvious thesis: I think it matters for Concrete Revolutio that theusual Japanese phrase for 'hero' is apparently 'ally of justice'.

This is 'hero' in the sense of (super)hero, which is what the charactersin Concrete Revolutio are. I don't know enough to know if Japanese hasa single word that directly

Every so often I worry that I have no sense of taste in anime, or at leastin action anime. After all I watch a lot of what is basically bland dreck( Haifuri this season , Luck & Logic last season , and the list goes on); to get me to not watchan action show, it usually has to be either unusually terribly made orunusually stuffed with obnoxious cliches (or both). I will really putup with a lot if you feed me a certain amount of tolerable action

Once again it's time for a 'midway' (or much of the way through) update on my early impressions of the season. This one is kindof delayed, partly because many shows entered a holding pattern earlyand partly because I've been blathering away with episode impressions on Twitter . Or at least that's myexcuse this time around.

Great:

• Concrete Revolutio : While CR is my favorite show this season, it'sbeen frustratingly inconsistent, partly because it's had a significant