I'm Still Alive, and I Walk Alone

8/19/2025

Wow, August is already over. Question mark? Interrobang mark?

This month has been rather mundane. There hasn't been anything particular for me to blog about. On the contrary, I've been closely following politics with Trump's summits and the like.

Now, a sharp pause.  I'm not about to turn this blog political or anything, but I think it's important to keep up with that kind of stuff as a dude pretty much right in his prime—to be drafed and fight and die in a trench somewhere in godknowswhere. I'm a month away from becoming a grand wizard, but there's no telling if by 2028 or 2029 I get drafted once all the younglings are burnt through in a two-front war. Alright boomers, it's your time to be drafted! That'd be the day.

So, my life. Well... heh... yeah. It's been good. It's because it's been so good there isn't much to yap about.

So I'll just get on with it and start with the anime.

Anime Summer 2025 Midway In Review

Panty and Stocking had a really solid ep5—they paraodied Kirby and American 60/70s' American morning cartoons and it was just ... man, absolute chef's kiss! If there was ever a anime that could counter Kyoani right now, it's Trigger with this episode. It was just pure eye candy, and the sassy cat segment was just as heart string pulling too. Really, how do you top something like that?

And then we get the femboy zoomers finally. That was also a splendid episode. This show has just been top-notch and has no signs of slowing down. So... speaking of the devil...

CITY The Animation

City ep5 was... wow, even just thinking about it now, it was.... wow. Leave it to Kyoani, who has suffered the biggest tragedy in anime history, truly rose from the ashes like a fervent phoenix and wowed everyone. I know I was stunned. Like with Trigger, how the hell do you top a episode like that? It truly was the most episode of all time. The only other instance I saw this pulled off magnificently was the microwave scene in MGS4(in case you missed it—I played that recently a few months back and I loved it, despite some caveats with how it was a step back from 3.)

Dress Up Darling season 2

I feel guilty. I don't have much to say about this segment. It's fun. It's cute. Gojo and Marin are so adorable. Marin is literally me frfr. We haven't watched ep7 yet, but apparently it has some serious Ryan Gosling vibes going on, which sounds exciting. So unfortunately I didn't get to post an update for it yet. I'm a anime only so I pretty much have no idea what I'm going in with this series. I did briefly watch one of those silly YT short clips where it kinda spoiled what happened later, so in that case it's like Ore Monogatari. I just hope it has a similiar happy ending.

Nyaight of the Sassy Cat

It's as silly as always.  I guess when you adapt a manga like this there's going to be crazy padding.

Busamen Gachi Fighter

Interesting tweest, she can see others Windows and she's the sister of the dork Cool Guy. Dun dun dun! I'm enjoying it so far. Who wouldn't enjoy their 1$ but added 2$ toppings every week? You know how many regulars I have at work who order the same exact thing for years on end? Quite a lot. It's no different. Comfort food is comfort food. Or drinks for that matter.

Call of the Night Season 2

I'll be honest, after writing Busamen Gachi Fighter segment, I stopped writing this blog post after about a hour or two and got a bit too tipsy while I shitposted in voice chat. Er... assuming you just stumbled upon this blog post for the first time by chance, I was watching this with my VRChat best friend with the first season back when it was still airing. Now, I've been watching it alone to pass the time, mostly just waiting for when I can be with my bf.

Well.. with that sudden unasked for lore out of the way.... How have I been enjoying this season? And to be honest, it literally is just the same old. The detective is clamping down on the vampires and trying to weed them out, Also, we learn Nazuna is half vampire half human: She never had to suck blood nor have her blood sucked while loving another vampire. Crazy shock! So I imagine you may have been begging yourself: Why aren't you watching some of these season 2 with your best friend?

And to answer that question, simply put, it's kind of weird to watch stuff concurrently with your best friend(male), with your boyfriend, as a male. I I never really brought up this point with my best friend, because it's a weird point to even bring up with the first place, and it'd be awkward if I did it now. He was always nice to me—my best friend, but we never dated. We just shared a hobby of watching anime together.

Also, we didn't share the same timezone(he's british) and both have narcolepsy, so I feared it was too risky to actually bother waking either up when they got too comfy and fell asleep by accident. When we first dated, it took a couple weeks (in both instances with either, but mostly with my best friend we watched new airing eps once a week), before I subtly diverted to just watching stuff altogether with my boyfriend.

So... wew, loredump out of the way, that's about it for airing anime. I've been kinda forcing ourselves to watch Legend of the Galactic Heroes(the original OVA). I never really gave the time of time to watch any of our other non-going shows.

I feel sort of guilty.

Now we briefly have the time to watch more this past week, so I might start slotting in Higurashi s2 and some other things, just in case he voices conconern we're watching too much LOTGH (we've both seen it already... but I still want to revisit it as I write the remainder of A Game of Cosmic Titans). We were also starting on Hell Girl season 2, so we may watch more of that.

There's a few more we may watch on the side but it remains undetermined as of the time I write this. I may show him the anime Onihei, which is something I've been meaning to show him forever. I also may guerilla show him one of my favorite relatable romance anime ever: Recovery of an MMO Junkie. He kinda expressed in the past he may not like it, but I want to give it a try at least. He loved the past romance anime I showed him before: Ore Monogatari, Bloom Into You, High Score Girl, and Adachi and Shimura.

I think that wraps up our anime. Of course, I still plan on showing him Gundam ZZ, and Votoms. We're trying to keep genres paced out to avoid burnout, so it's why after Gundam Gquuax I wanted to resume LoTGH. Going forward I have no idea what non-airing shows I may continue going. I want to finish loTGH at the very least or spread it out more.

Moving on past the anime...

So the real reason, more or less, I haven't been making updates recently. It just so happens going forward I have not the slighest idea when updates may occur. I try not to include the bad happenings in my life, which there is no real shortage of. But lately, ever since I started taking newer Ashwagandha supplements, specifically these, I... just... have had a healthly life since last update. That specific episode I mentioned therein was.... just... quite.... possibly the worst I've ever had yet.

And... yet... I... simply haven't been having too much mental issues lately. Have I spoken too soon? Is the tidal wave yet to hit? Or is a good life just simply a mundane boring one with no disasters? Or something of that effect... beside the aforementioned topics highlighted at the beginning of this blog post, or one of my family members who keeps a roof over my head dies and we're forced to move out of this house, I'm doing fine.

I feel the supplements are doing a remarkable work. I still have aggressive suicidal thoughts, but they're no longer a part of my life... as much.

Whenever I get the chane, either if I'm at my phone or physically at my computer, which is... frequently(when not in VR), I try to write A Game of Cosmic Titans. I want to say most of the time I can make some progress. I consider it a day's well done when I write my soft 250 word goal, or 275 word goal—both are worth 1 whole physical page. But since last update... I had good progress and other days, most days sadly, it's just been meh (especially when I'm with my bf). There's now a page for AGOCT. The idea is I will try to keep it updated in real-time.

However, even writing this up now, it may not appear with the actual links just yet. This is because I still need to line edit each chapter still. When I wrote The Yellow Typhoon and the Final Waltz, they were already line edited and done with, there was barely any further last-second editing to be done.

Writing A Game of Cosmic Titans, I'm not yet taking the same approach. I do however have a few drafts I published online so far of Cosmic Titans. Note that certain things will be edited given the feedback I have received so far, but the soul of it remains. This fiction's outline is mostly complete, I would so far as say to say between 85% to 95% done. That last percentage is what I described in the last blog post in July as being good enough and to focus on writing the first draft instead.

A Game of Cosmic Titan's main and only POV is Lawrence Mengde. He is the same side character as in Yellow Typhoon and the Final Waltz. Given the nature of the inspiration of Yoshiki Tanaka's Legend of the Galactic Heroes novels, as well as Kitty Film Mitaka Studio's anime OVA adaptation and Production IG's modern adaptation, there is a plethora of other POVs throughout the novel and anime.

I've been challenging myself to write LotGH but essentially from one explicit POV—Lawrence Mengde, or the McDonalds discount Yang Wen'li. So far, I fear it may be a genuine challenge. As I am rewatching the OVA, I am also loosely reading the original novel(specifically just Yang's chapters).

So far, the outline is purely from Lawrence's perspective, right up until Operation Ragnarok/Vermilion. I kinda merged that alongside the Fortress vs Fortress, and it's where I decided to pause the outline writing to focus on the first draft. There is, however, two distinict chapters who focus on two different "antagonists" (NotPhezzan, and NotReinhard-o). It remains to be seen if I will include those in the final draft or if I will expand upon their narratives more. Likely, I won't. I did it with Saga of the Cosmic Heroes and I regretted it. When you think about it, LotGH should'd really just ended at vol5 or the beginning of vol6 as the definitive ending. The original author of LotGH, Yoshiki Tanaka, intended it to be the ending for the series, but he was pressured into writing more as contracts and he needed money anyway.

That's one benefit, perhaps, not being contracted to write more. I don't have to write 9 gorillion books in one series to make end's meet! There's practically no demand by a literary house to write 8 more sequels to milk dry. Not me. There's literally no Western equivalent of Legend of the Galactic Heroes. And... perhaps... there never will be. There's no demand for it. No market.

Sure, eventually AI slopa could make a version of it one day, but that's far off in the future, isn't it? And the only version they would scrape is mine, which is the closet, loosest adaptation of Yoshiki Tanaka's Legend of the Galactic Heroes. Is that a good or bad thing thing to bask in, being the only REAL equivalent, natively, in the English language? The only contenders is, really, either, the Expanse or maybe Honor Herrington. On the webnovel scene there's How the Stars Turned Red. Then there was my own Saga of the Cosmic Heroes which is deleted but it's still available on some scraper sites still. So who knows?

And now, soon, whenever it releases, there will be A Game of Cosmic Titans, so some chucklefuck could ask chatgpt to make a space opera based off mine and Viola, there he goes. A quick buck on Amazon at my expense. That's all hypothetical though, but for how long?

 Right now, the whole first draft is sitting at 10k across the first four chapters. The latest one is still a work in progress as I'm writing this and it's been a struggle revisiting it again as it's technically a rewrite of the first draft I wrote back in November. That chapter alone was 9k words and still incomplete(since I went to focus on outlining instead).

So far, the new chapter is being split into two and I have no idea what wordcount it may end up. I think I'm just too scared to actually rewrite this part since I have to get it right or it'll end up forced. I hope any potential readers read Yellow Typhoon so the emotional punch hits harder than when I beat my meat. The first chapter had a good reception to the few I showed, so maybe I was doing something right at least.

I'm starting to run out of momentum for this update, so let's start wrapping things up.

A while ago I revisited the initial synopsis I had for AGOCT. I decided to trim it down, and I forgot how challenging it can be to write these, so this is AGOCT's right now:

Lawrence Mengde is an avid historian and reluctant war hero of countless battles. Yet, he yearns for nothing more than to carve out an everlasting peace from this fruitless war. A war he cannot escape, a past he cannot give up.

As a Commodore in the Confederate Star Fleet, Lawrence will soon partake in the next allied campaign, the newly moblized Seventh Coalition, in its bid to seize the Imperium's Space Fortress Ishtar.

As the war enters its final stages, Lawrence must navigate through war's ever-mounting tragedies and casualties. What lengths of patriotism will he go to for his country? How much more will he have to sacrifice in a titanic struggle which continues to rob everything from him?

I think it sounds nice. I may delete that middle paragraph though. We'll see. In a similiar lane, I tackled Yellow Typhoon's because it was wordy. Here it is now:

It's a race against time for Victoria Schwarzenberger. She and the rest of her task force are in intense pursuit of the Imperium's mobile space asteroid fortress, Zeta. Its very trajectory threatens to destroy the military orbital installations protecting her home planet of Fasnakyle.

Victoria is an ace of aces as a Mobile Trooper pilot. She is Neo sapiens: The next step in human evolution with incredibly heightened spatial awareness abilities. She is without equal among her peers and the enemy—and yet she must confront the most fearsome opponent she has ever faced.

Is there truly any hope for Victoria to save Fasnakyle? Can she prevail against the odds and what may be her toughest waltz yet? The war reaches its theatrical overture to the beginning of the end of this fruitless, eternal war.

I think it's prettier. I may omit that middle paragraph here as well. I use 'war' a little too much in both synopses so I've been thinking how I can word them better.

A Game of Cosmic Titans now has a proper cover! The quality blew me away. I took a gamble because I never commissioned this artist before but he was on my artist bookmarks for the last 5 years. He didn't disappoint, not one bit! I will certainly commission him more in the future.

The artist is Gie. Awesome guy!

I think that about covers it for my writing. On the reading side of things, I'm some 100 pages left of Iliad, and then... finally I can tackle Odyssey, or take a little break to crunch some of the webnovels I've been slacking on.

I played a bit of BF6 open beta earlier this week. It was fun, but I probably won't buy it. I haven't been doing much because of writing. MGS3 Delta is out later this month and I'm stoked for that. Oh, the usual FF11 progress too, and Fortnite with friends.

I think I covered all the bases this update. So... until next time! Maybe expect a MGS3 Delta-leaning update. So... ja ne!