Fishin' in the stream of consciousness (all-purpose, no topic chat thread)

Druid/Cleric/Called Out.

 

Bard, so Bard it hurts.
#what do you mean musicals are unrealistic #i burst into song all the time

 

Barbarian, fighter, paladin.

 

Storm Ciara done a number on the local bistro

Spoiler: Pic of river damaged building

 

Holy SHIT

 

Looks like most of the effectiveness is simply due to the mass of the thing. It smashes things and THEN extends.

 

Hey, I'm getting shoulder surgery in the near future and my dominant arm is gonna be in a sling for 6 weeks. its gonna. suck. can you pls recommend anime and manga for me to watch and read while i recover so im not bored to tears? i love slice of life and fantasy stuff, but if the catch is good i'll watch other things too!

 

When you say "slice of life" are you looking more for "slice of life comedy" or "slice of life drama"? Because I don't have a lot of experience with the latter, but if you're looking for the former, here are some of my suggestions:

• Hitori Bocchi no Marumaru Seikatsu - in case you want something unbelievably wholesome and cute. Slice-of-life comedy about a socially anxious girl challenging herself to make new friends, after having only had her One Friend her entire life. Everyone is nice in her world and only good things happen, and also the characters she ends up absorbing into her Friends Harem are all a lot of fun...they're all pretty wacky figures in their own way. I appreciated this show a lot for its character dynamics and cute factor, and for having, as far as I can remember, no bad episodes.
• Machikado Mazoku - in case you want your slice of life to have more magical girls!! Well, demon girls and magical girls, and also it's actually the demon girl who's the main character. She theoretically needs to defeat the local magical girl in combat in order to restore her family's power, but in practice she's too weak to get there yet...so they're mostly just friends. And training buddies. (And maybe...something more?) (It's one of those yuri-lite shows that doesn't fully commit to being a Romance Anime, but it's also not not a Romance Anime either...I mean, the anime is an adaptation of a much longer manga, so I don't know how far the relationship gets in the manga, but it's pretty slow-burn. I think it's very cute for what it is, though. That hero/ineffectual cartoon villain ship dynamic.)
• Asobi Asobase - in case you get tired of watching cute anime girls be cute and just want to see some go ape shit. Slice-of-life comedy about a group of friends being little shits to each other in various ways. Some of the skits landed for me, and some of them didn't, but the ones that landed really landed; I still get sucked into rewatching Asobi Asobase clips on Youtube sometimes. The comedic timing is just stellar.

(Fair warning that I'm pretty sure Asobi Asobase has some vaguely mean-spirited treatment of an Ambiguously Trans/GNC side character; if you want to avoid it, I can go back and figure out which episodes that character features in. It's not like watching those skits is necessary to watch the rest of the show.)

And if you'll allow me to make two recommendations for shows that are neither particularly slice-of-life nor particularly fantasy-oriented:

• Code Geass - this recommendation is totally biased and based on the fact that I am currently rewatching Code Geass myself, and I have watched 42 episodes in the past week. So I clearly need to drag someone else into this hell. But like, genuinely, it's damn fun. It's like...a mecha war tactics/political intrigue show, and it also definitely does have fantasy elements, but I think most people enjoy it just for the sheer charismatic pull of the main character, who is hammy as hell and just such a fucking mess. The plot goes in some wild directions and honestly I respect it for the sheer audacity of the stunts it pulls. It's a show where sometimes it's hard to decide whether to laugh or cry. A show with neither fear nor shame.
• Kaiji - on my money, this is the one anime that's most easy to unintentionally watch in one sitting. (I know I certainly did, at least.) It's about this depressed greasy rat man trying to gamble his way out of poverty, and risking life and limb in the process, but always fighting onwards with the sheer force of his will, and the strength of his strategies... The thing is that each episode leaves you with a feeling of suspense and a need to watch the next episode, but it never feels forced. It really feels like it earns the suspense.

(...And if you're okay with something that is neither an anime nor a manga but a visual novel, then pls read Umineko. I'd need another post to really delve into this recommendation, but it has so many things to offer so many people...the fantasy elements, the mystery elements, the character drama, the discussion of how fiction and personal narrative affects our lives, the discussion of cycles of abuse, the societal commentary on cisheterocentrism and capitalism and fear and greed...and it's also just a lot of fun. But it helps to devote a chunk of time to reading through the first episode. Like Homestuck, it has a reputation for having kind of a slow start, and you don't really get a sense of the plot until you've gotten through some of the second episode. I'm not positive how much the visual novels cost on Steam right now, but I know that there are definitely no-commentary "LPs" of Umineko up on Youtube that you can use to read it...)

 

My friend, have you ever seen the delight that is Mushishi? It's an episodic adventure story about a guy wandering Japan to help people having problems with Mushi, the local spirit-critter-amoebas. Each episode is a self contained story with the plot somewhere between a ghost story, a fairy tale, and a BBC Nature Documentary.

Also, I suggest Azumanga Daioh. It's, like the prototypical Slice-of-Life anime about a bunch of high school girls being dumb friends together. It was astonishingly popular in its prime, but it's also from 2002 and maybe its not as well known these days? Idk you've probably heard of it but I'd rather show it off twice than risk it being unsaid.

 

Umineko is the best million words of overly-complicated visual novel to be completely impossible to rec. It's $25 for the first half and $30 for the second on Steam right now, and does carry a whole mess of content warnings (particularly for graphic child abuse) and a recommendation to absolutely not look at the Wikipedia page because it casually spoils the whole thing, but yeah, there's several LPs. I think most of them have the PS3 art patch, which may be a plus, though they also mostly have the pre-Steam translation. It demands a lot of brain-engagement as well as time investment, which may be either or a plus or a minus. I've heard the manga is relatively okay, but the anime is spectacularly terrible.

My favorite anime is Darker than Black, a series set in Tokyo about a decade after a mysterious event that dropped a huge anomaly in the center of the city, blotted out the stars across the whole planet, and started giving people superpowers. It's kind of like if X-Men decided to be a gritty spy drama and then watched a lot of Evangelion. There are reports of a second season, but these are a collective hallucination.

 

ive seen half of the first season of mushishi! :D and ive got azumanga daioh on dvd, its one of my favorite series to read and watch. x3

 

(Oh, also: the abridged series of Sword Art Online is so good that it is widely regarded as an enormous improvement on the source material even divorced from the context of being a parody of it. Many of the characters have much clearer motivations and stronger arcs, and it quietly closes a bunch of plot holes without making a production of it and edits around the majority of the creepier fanservice. Not something with enough content to binge for days, but what there is is a pretty good time even if you're not familiar with the source material, as long as you don't mind some dark stuff in the first three episodes and humor that's derived in large part from most of the characters being gigantic assholes.)

 

Highly recommend k-on for when you have 20% of your brain to spend on watching something. There’s not much plot, but it’s cute and fun.

I’d like to second Mushishi. It’s one of the most beautiful, haunting anime I’ve ever watched.

princess jellyfish is a fun, cute slice of life. It never really goes anywhere, and tends to forget its plot every couple episodes, but it’s a really fun premise and the characters are delightful.

It’s not slice of life, but if you want to watch something short, fun, and goofy, I highly recommend Sirius the Jaeger. It’s dumb as shit And I loved every minute of it.

 

Cells At Work has been pretty cute so far, even if it's not slice of life

 

If you haven't already, Dungeon Meshi (otherwise known as Delicious in Dungeon) is very good. Fantasy cooking in a magical dungeon using monsters/etc. as ingredients. Marcille was my avatar for a long long time. I love it and think everyone should read it

 

Dungeon Meshi is also notable for the absolutely incredible amount of thought the author has put into the ecology of an underground labyrinth full of man-eating monsters.

 

It's an American cartoon rather than an anime, and it's not slice-of-life really, but what I've seen of OK KO: Let's Be Heroes is utterly delightful and cute! It's about a little boy who wants to be a superhero and his job at a hero store. c:

 

you’ve probably already seen it, but just in case I gotta rec Gekkan Shojo Nozaki-kun! it’s about a high school boy who is secretly a wildly successful shojo romance mangaka. every single character is maximum quirky, it is both hilarious and adorable

 

I may never recover from the beginning of episode 10. I laughed so damn hard. I laughed on so many levels.