You're listening to The World Is My Burrito, my first 2025 episode. This is gonna go over some of the stuff with the podcast, what's been going on since I've taken so long to release an episode. And one of the main things I wanted to cover this time is actually kind of my opinions on modern animation, like some things that I've been noticing that are going on. Yeah, hope you enjoy the episode. This is again where the intro would go. It's gonna be by X Japan. I've got all the band back together. So it's gonna work this time. I should turn lights on behind me, shouldn't I? Through the magic of editing, everything looks the same as it did earlier if you're watching this on YouTube. And if you're just listening to this in your ear balls, obviously everything's going to sound the same. Okay, so, for starters, yeah, this is gonna be a different episode. I kinda wanted to do this a couple of weeks ago. I've kinda wanted to do a lot of stuff over the last couple of weeks. We'll get into it. And then I didn't, and, yeah, so here we are. Okay, so... The main thing, I realized when I did my episode last time, I kinda had this cryptic thing towards the ending where I was just like, man, I'm tired. Turns out I had the flu after I, literally, the moment I stopped recording the Tokyo Godfather's episode and turned around to walk away, it hit me. And I realized it's like, God, no wonder, I was actually very tired doing that recording. I didn't do quite as much as I wanted to with that episode. There wasn't a ton of loss, but there were couple of things I skipped out on, even in the pre-written script, which I'm pretty adamant about sticking to, barring livening it up a little bit. So yeah, I was sick, and then the holidays, and then I got sick again in January, that time with just a cold. We got a dog. Maybe I'll post a photo somewhere she's sleeping right now, So I'm really not going to bother her. Otherwise they would totally pick her up and show her on camera right now. But yeah, so some of the things I want to do in 2025, that's going to be kind of where we start off with in the podcast. I would like to have 12 episodes out this year. I'm already really shooting myself in the foot because I haven't done two episodes yet. And it's March, so I'm going to have to kind of double down, find some topics. I'm not really going to half ass it any more than I was already planning to. I wasn't going to half ass anything, but it is very difficult to do some of these episodes like this year. For starters, I wanted to start my year. I didn't care. A lot of people have done their you know, what are we doing this year thing? And that's fine. That's great for other podcasts. I didn't care about doing kind of a 2025 update. I was just going to do. Battle Royale. That's the episode I wanted to start with and that has become so all-encompassing that it kind of I ran into a wall that was very like I needed to take time to just I mean I'd already obviously taken a break from the podcast but I thought yeah this is gonna be super easy to just go back into and do this episode and this is Truly one of the starter episodes where I'm realizing like I do need to make a change in how I do things I've always really appreciated long format video and podcast breakdowns on stuff I I love watching Super Eyepatch Wolf and Mother's Basement there plenty of more people out there who make these like 45 minute to hour plus long videos that are just extremely dense and to be honest, that's kind of one of Not to be honest, you already know this most you probably already know this I wanted to start a lot of this podcast as Kind of like covering Osamu Tezuka which I still haven't done because it's still daunting and Battle Royale Comes around and the normal thing happens where the more I look into it the bigger I realize this is or at least deeper May not necessarily be magnanimous, but there's so much out there. There's the book There's two different translations of the book. There's the movie. There's the manga. There's the new manga and It it's like holy crap. There's just so much and I even I did I got the book knocked out pretty quickly. I think like a week and a half the downside to that was I was Getting into the book at the same time as doing two conventions with an all-day event squeezed in the middle there so over the course of like seven days I had six days of Photo work and these are all honestly like 12 plus hour days from start to finish So that's a lot And I still managed to knock the book out, but I was so winded by focusing on all that and I got all of that done quickly to get the podcast done and it didn't work, because it's still a lot. So what I'm realizing, I'm saying all that to say, I personally need to take a break. I need to change the way that I'm doing the podcast. Taking a break is the wrong phrasing. Don't look into it. But I really need to change the way that I'm doing this, because what I normally do is I spend so much time writing everything out from beginning to end. I mean, you've... seen the videos, you've listened to the podcast, it's scripted from top to bottom, and I mean we're in the dozens of pages sometimes, and it's fun, but it is extremely tiring. Now let's just, on top of that, when I do these recordings in a day, I generally customize the, any of the marketing stuff that you see, so the thumbnail, the custom thumbnail, the Instagram stuff. I do all of that on the same day as recording and I do audio touch-ups on the same day as recording, obviously. The reason why I don't have a schedule is because generally the day that I start recording, it is my intent to be like, okay, I am going to start this recording and that's today. Today is podcast day and everything gets done and there have been a couple of times where I would start at like eight or nine o'clock in the morning and between other responsibilities I'd get done at like 11 or 12 o'clock at night just in time to push stuff out. And you know, for the most part that's okay. But there is, you know, there is a roughness to doing that, obviously, just spending an entire day doing the one thing that's supposed to be fun. you know, mentioning Mother's Basement and Super Eye Patch Wolf, if you listen to them, Truly listen, the seeing is kind of whatever, but you'll notice that their audio kind of changes throughout the video. And when they're not releasing content, you know, Mother's Basement comes out pretty quickly. And I guess technically so does Super Eye Patch Wolf for generally having now these like two plus hour videos, video essays, but they're doing it in parts. And that has always, always, always been on my mind that it's like, I should really just do this in parts, but I don't. And so it's whatever, just been limping by managing to just make ends meet per episode. And again, Battle Royale with so many different topics, it's like I need to... like take a step back and cover particular things one chunk at a time. So say cover the, you know, book and the movie at once and then spend my time working on the manga. Cause there's so much, so much that goes into it. Even kind of the final spur for doing this was one of the facts that I found out about the history behind release timing of the original book I'll bring it up in the actual episode, but it's one of those things where it's like holy crap This is extremely deep and it's extremely niche It's it's minimal. I say it's deep. It's it's just like it's a tiny thing that Increased the complexity of this episode by so much And stuff like that just puts puts everything so far off I think I mentioned in the Ghost of Tsushima episode, I don't have the transcript near me, but I spent one day, I think I spent about eight hours and all I got out of it was a couple of lines of information. And I feel like they're extremely valuable for the podcast to do stuff like that. But if it's taking hours and hours to get, you know, one to two sentences worth of information, you can tell the weight of a podcast can be quite a lot. And that's why I do really enjoy it when people invite me onto their podcast because it's like, sweet. Y'all just banter back and forth. Hell yeah. Any day of the week. I've done, I think three or four of those in the last three months. Every time someone messages me, I jump and just like cancel all the plans. Forget about date night, Brenda. I'm going to podcast. No, I don't do that. But It's so easy, y'all got it. It's so easy. It's so nice. And these are fun, but man, yeah, it's a mindset thing. Like I really gotta treat myself better so that I can treat the content better so that you listeners can get more out of it. Cause one of my constant notes to myself, cause I take notes on my notes. I have notes in my brain and notes written in notes. about how I felt about episodes and I'm always missing content and I'm sure I always will. There's always something that I forgot to say or forgot to add and that's why I send a lot of links because it's like hopefully, you know, y'all sometimes go out and watch these things or read these things that I link. At least, you know, inspired enough because that's kind what I want. Inspired enough for you to be like, yeah, sure, I'll look a little bit more into this or maybe feel like you've got enough. Who knows? Who cares? No, it's... I really want to change my methodology of doing things, and the additional trade-off is I really should do more like Taquitos, and I should do more episodes concerning what I'm about to talk about. The other reason it's taken so long to get things done was getting completely absorbed into Cyberpunk 2077, and then kind of getting absorbed into Dragon Ball Solo Leveling Shangri-La Frontier, Just everything to... I don't know, escapism. Take my mind off of stuff. So... What do I do now? Do I wanna just... Do we just gonna go into some of the other stuff? Okay, so the escapism. No, we're not gonna talk about that. That's a loaded topic. But yeah, so I've done a bunch of things that have just started getting wedged more while while still reading or doing things concerning Battle Royale. Wedging my productivity further and further apart, so I finally said screw it. I'm just going to finish cyberpunk and be done with it and So I want to talk about some of the stuff that I've been doing Heavy stuff out of the way long story short I I want to provide even better content for you the listeners or the viewers if you're on YouTube It's That's going only going to be marginally visibly different if you're on YouTube because I don't know if I'm willing to I'm ready and willing to do the full-on like video essayist thing right now. I know that is a job in and of itself. So, the things that I've been using for escapism. I started cyberpunk last year in probably like November and I quit it on day one within like two or three hours because one of the primary functions in the game, teleporting, was not working. And the first day like the first two or three hours of playing, think I blue-screened three times. This is on the PS5, so far fewer bugs on the PS5. And I was like, I can't deal with this. Like, I do not have the, you know, mental capacity to deal with a game that, like, requires teleporting because the map is absolutely massive. Even if you're driving the fastest vehicle in the game, it still takes minutes to reach one into the other. And it's very normal. You know, I've learned this down the line, but I kind of knew it going in that it's like, yeah, it's going to be normal if you're going to have a fetch quest, this is going to take you from the furthest north to the furthest south. Got to be able to teleport. So I was like, yeah, I can't deal with a game that doesn't teleport. And then after, you know, talking more with Brenda and stuff and thinking about it more, I was like, fine, I'll give it one more shot. And it turns out that was just the glitch that day. I don't know that it ever happened again. I feel like it happened maybe once or twice more on separate days, but I got a lot smarter. I saved literally every single time I was about to teleport. So if you play the game, I would honestly recommend that just save before teleporting. Because if you've been playing for several hours on end and then you decide to teleport and everything goes to hell, you're to be a little mad. All your autosaves disappear too, because it's a complete like cache a wipe so yeah save before teleporting save before doing anything in that game so cyberpunk 2077 what i ended up learning about this is you kind of have to appreciate it for the glitches and bugs i feel like glitches is the better word because there's nothing that's like consistent and that was sort of why i found this game charming probably the only consistent thing is The game does need to be like completely shut off every so often, like power your PS5 down. And I've noticed the PS5's weird. We've only had it for a couple of months. Sometimes, even if I fully shut it off and turn the game back on, it's like already ready to go. And I'm like, dude, I shut you down. So I think it's still leaving kind of like an image ready to go for the game. So maybe unplug it sometimes too to make sure that it's fully wiping everything because when the game starts getting glitchy, it's usually maybe around the three hour play mark. It's happened a little bit earlier, but at like three to four hours, if you're constantly playing and that's also self-admittance of like why I was getting nothing done because I'm noticing this is around the three to four hour time mark. Things just get weird. the game starts getting quirky and it's kinda funny. It's eventually, like once it starts, maybe finish up what you're doing and then go touch grass because that is kind of the precursor to this game just being like, just fuck right off. Like everything's about to go to hell, nothing's about to work. So, you know, appreciate those little tiny glitches that give you a wee bit of a break. I wrote some of them down, again, like the biggest one in the game that is more of a glitch than a bug because again, it wasn't a consistent thing was the teleport thing, but yeah, one that I faced intermittently a couple of times was characters standing up after dying. So you'd go slay a bunch of people and then One of them might just stand up. Sometimes maybe a second one might just stand up. And so it's just that loose, the loose body, the loose rigging, like a, not a mannequin, a puppet, you know, you know what I'm talking about on the string, a stringed puppet, just kind of getting pulled up and then standing perfectly straight. And it's weird because like their eyes are open and they're just looking right at you. Yeah, that's odd. One of the... And it's on the day that I thought this thought. I was thinking to myself, you know, for all the glitches that I had, I've never seen, like when you get into a car, do you remember Grand Theft Auto: Vice City I don't think San Andreas did this, but because you know, vice city. So vice city, when you get into a car, almost every car turns into that car. It was just a fun little quirk about Grand Theft Auto Vice City. Like you want a super rare car or something and then you finally find it and you hop in and then they're everywhere. And I was thinking to myself, you know, it's kind of funny that I haven't seen this in this game. You know, it was just a quirky glitch from 20 years ago, 20 plus years ago. And then like that same day, maybe an hour later, I got into a car and literally every car was that car. And it was so funny and it's like, okay, again, this is probably around that three hour mark. So I was like, all right, I'll do what I'm doing. And then I'll give the game a rest. You know, I'll relax and go do my thing. Go touch grass. Yeah, there's so many quirky things. had like, towards the end of the game, people randomly spawned. maybe four feet off the ground in the middle of a lane and it was creating minor traffic but traffic nonetheless behind every single one of them was one to two cars and they were interactive so you know you could see them they could talk to you like it was an interactable NPC so that was weird sometimes the bugs aren't always as good I really didn't take a whole lot of notes on this I'm kind of Banking on memory here, which is not the smartest thing to do. Because I didn't think I was going to do an episode on this. But, nonetheless, some of these glitches get really annoying. Because there's a race aspect to the game. And you can choose your own car, or you can choose the car of the NPC that's prompting this race quest. And the very first time I did this, I could not... get the mission to start. Even resetting the PS5 and everything, it was just glitched. I couldn't do anything with my car, like it was there. It wasn't in the right spot, so I thought maybe I'd park it. You the NPC was like, I'm gonna go take a breather real quick and walks away. So I'm trying all these different mix-ups of, okay, well, let me finagle my car into the starting point, and that's not working. I go talk to the NPC. There's nothing left to say. I've ended the dialogue there. And they, I remember, they'd commented something about, you know, the... it was like, starting the race. So I'm walking around, like the game's not giving me anything. N-nothing. Like no hints as to what to do next. It's just saying get in your car or whatever, or like start the race. so I'm just running around, like maybe I have to talk to someone to start the race. Yeah, no, never worked. The only thing that ever worked was by going a couple of saves back and agreeing... to use the NPC's car and that spawned into the spot just fine. And so it's like, okay, for the rest of the game, I just use their car because I wasn't going to deal with that anymore. So that's kind of a bummer sometimes. It's like, yeah, we're going to give you a badass vehicle. You got all this cool stuff that we threw in the game. But for the race, you can't actually use it. You know, a little upsetting, but I also realized that the giant hunk of metal that is her truck. is probably the best vehicle to use for the races because it's the easiest to turn oddly enough the boat is a lot you gotta finagle with you gotta know how to you know lay hands on the controller but it's the easiest one yeah naturally like the fastest car in the game they're too fast way too fast truck just fine it slides it drifts like a pro where the super fast cars just go everywhere. So that was kind of a weird thing to learn. Yeah, speaking of that, some of the charms of the game, the most fun vehicles in the game are the ones that you least expect. Like there is a joy to hopping in. It's a car that's called the Gecko. It's an off-road. Imagine a VW Golf that's made for off-roading. So this thing is nuts. The controls are dog shit. It's going all over the place, but it's so much fun. Sometimes if you just wanted to have fun, I'd bust that car out and drive it across the desert and just lose control. It's enjoyable. And then one of the other fun cars that's oddly easy to operate is it's basically a smart car. This game has race cars. have their own version of the Batmobile. They have their versions of Lamborghinis and Ferraris and Audi R8s. And the ones that are the most fun to drive are the most boring ones in the game. You would think aesthetically there's nothing pleasing or maybe minutia pleasing about it. But the ones that bring actual joy are the dumbest ones. There's a... It's not really like a VW van. It really is kind of like a cross between a VW van and like a Honda Acty. So it's bigger than a K van, but smaller than a VW van. And I learned, and here's one of the other weird things in the game, braking sucks. If you want to stop quickly, get out of your car. It'll like, they slam on the brakes and the character gets out. So that was my method of breaking the car quickly in the game. And... What I learned with this dumb van is when you do that, if you're at a high enough speed, will like can, you know, it slides a little bit as you hop out, it catches on the ground and flips over upside down. It'll do it 100 % of the time. I did this like three or four times. The first time I thought it was an accident. And then the other times were like, well, I wonder. And yeah, it worked every time. Hilarious, terrible vehicle, slow as hell. So much fun. Yeah. So Story-wise, story's great, story's pretty short. But all of their side stuff, I think, is pretty solid. They have the tons and tons and tons of missions. NCPD missions, you have gigs, you have side missions, main missions. I think, I swear, there was like one or two more. But there's all these different types of missions and while the main story is its own chunk I enjoyed By the way, I did all these I put over 100 hours in the game I have I got to do some technique based things, but I've essentially platinumed the game at this point But all these little missions they bring a little bit more life into the world of Night City And sometimes, and this is kind of one of the disappointing bits where you, can't always remember interactions with people, but some of the NCPD missions will involve some of the fixers in the game or some of the people that you've done missions with before, someone will bring them up or maybe the person like they were doing a gig for that person. And it's like, man, I really wish I could remember this because you know, it's cool that this is not part of the fixer mission. It's not part of anything big. but there's this tiny little window that lets you see a little bit more into the personalities of the fixers here. Yeah, and speaking of all the missions, their layout for that is horrific. I am gonna kinda go back and forth again, going for memory. I didn't wanna take notes, because I never thought I'd be here. Don't at me. But yeah, CDPR, notoriously awful with menus. The Witcher 3, I love that game. Menu was god awful. Cyberpunk 2077, somehow they made it worse. I honestly feel like going through a lot of that stuff is far worse than what the Witcher ever was. I've seen, you know, maybe not as bad as the original Witcher 3 menu, which I didn't have to deal with. They did an overhaul if you didn't know. It was so bad that they overhauled their menu within like the first six months in The Witcher 3. So 2077, it's like you eventually sort of figure everything out, but it doesn't tell you anything. They have like training things in the game, which are awful because they're like, hey, you're an idiot. You've never played a first person shooter before. Tell me how to use the menu. Tell me how to use the journal. They're just like hoping you figure this stuff out, but there's no prompts for what it even does. There's, yeah, there's so much stuff that's never explained. Even some of the status effects, there's something in the game called mitigation. No one actually knows what that means, but people online have like they mathed the math and kind of figured out what that means. It's like an additional thing of defense that takes like the equations come in after your armor is taken into account. and all this other stuff and it's like why do we even have mitigation? Why don't we just call it something else or get rid of entirely and just give me some dang armor? You know, simplify it because if you're not gonna if you don't even know what it means because CDPR doesn't have any official thing on what mitigation means like if you don't know what it means then don't put it in the game. Make it something else but it's not a game breaking thing it's just kind of stacking on other things it's annoying anyways. The game's great, the story's great, So... There's, yeah, there's a lot to the story if you're not trying to platinum it. I want to play this again, but next time's gonna be more of a speed run. And it should change a lot of the dialogue options I get out of characters down the line. But yeah, it's been out long enough, I think, at this point. Really, the simplistic bit of the story is you are, you're being taken over by another personality. And that's the game. You're dying and this other personality is overriding you and you're trying to figure out what to do with this. Like, where do you go from here? The other personality is Keanu Reeves as Johnny Silverhand, which is great. Keanu Reeves, he could do a better job, but I feel like the character is written well and I feel like he is a good choice. If you're a fan of Keanu Reeves' performance in Sonic 3, basically Shadow is Johnny Silverhand. Almost beat for beat. Very similar reasons for doing what they do. Similar time frames for how long it's been since they've been around. They're both kind of nihilistic, very much into the end of the earth. Yeah, they're very punk rock, so... yeah. I've done three of the primary endings, two of those branch off, and I've done the branches. But one of the things... Yeah, so you can end this multiple ways too, by the way. And that is its own. They are wild experiences. I would recommend them, but each one of them takes probably another two hours of its own just to do the ending. It tells you, hey, the game's about to end, and like, it just keeps going, and it's not bad. It's like... Holy crap, how do you turn a movie out of the end of this game, basically? We're kinda deep into this. I'm like 30 minutes in, man. I didn't think I'd be talking about this long. So. I will say, one of the things of note, that really stood out to me, so Johnny Silverhand is a construct in your brain. He cannot physically touch you, because he's just data, he's in your brain. But there is a point at the end of the game, and it is the end of the game, it's the last decision you can make in one of these particular playthroughs, I'm not gonna go into spoilers for that. Because that is like the fun of the game, is the ending that you choose and getting to experience these. There is a point where the last thing Johnny Silverhand does is shake your hand. He's kind of reluctant at first, like you put it out. Cause again, the whole game, he's a construct in your brain. You put your hand out in this virtual realm to shake his and it takes him a second. And he finally does. And then just before you walk away, he pulls you a little bit closer, like just a couple of inches. And that like that hit me. real hard because it's like this is the first time Johnny has ever touched my character in the game is this moment like when it happens it's like god this is you know there's a lot right now the endings some of them are you know less exciting but the endings are really good I think the game itself is great I will say platinuming the game and this is kind of akin to Witcher If you try to platinum the game, it will take a chunk. It'll take a lot of breath out of the main story. That was one of my issues in Witcher 3. I spent 80 hours on that game. And, at the time, I go fight the end boss and I'm just like, what the hell is going on? What am I even doing now? I don't remember any of this because I've spent so much time doing all this side stuff. You know, the game, both of them... I'm bleeding. Where did that come from? for the video watchers. I don't know where it came from. I don't know where it's actually coming from. I'm not worried about it. So. God, that really derailed me. Yeah, Cyberpunk 2077, I would recommend it. Okay, so maybe don't platinum it if you really want to get the story. I kind of feel like I wish I'd done things in reverse where I had done a more focused playthrough the first time and then the second time kind of do everything. You know, like I'm not happy with my build in the end of the game. I'm not happy with how long it took to learn how certain things function. But I am happy with the game overall and I think it'll make for a much better second playthrough. And honestly, think you can, I'm pretty sure, howlongtoplay.com or howlongtobeat.com has it at kind of a high set of hours, but I'm pretty sure you can beat the game in like 20 hours, maybe 25 hours if to do just the story. I mean, even some of the side things, if you want to expand just a little bit more, but The story is surprisingly short and I think Witcher 3 was kind of like that too. It's been a couple of years but that's another game where it's like, dude, the main game is kind of nothing. There's a lot of side content that's very easy to just get absorbed in. So, you know, check it out sometime. Don't play it on PS4. Brenda did, she beat it on PS4. But I tell everyone, it's the weirdest thing sitting in the entertainment room, the TV behind me, currently playing Dirty Pair. She was playing on that and I'm at the PC that's to my left And I cannot tell you how many times I'd be sitting here doing my thing And then all of sudden the entire room just turns blue because the ps4 just blue screened And I'd be sitting here playing something and it's just blue screen and then like 20 minutes later Whole room lights up again blue screen that I would never play Another game that I started and beat in one go about 40 hours ish. Prey So. hey, cool, I can mark clip. I'm using Riverside again. I didn't mention that up top, but I'm sampling it one more time. Thanks to doing recordings with other people, I've noticed a lot of changes that I like, so we'll see. The main one being hey, if you are watching this the last time I used Riverside, they wouldn't accept the iPhone as a camera, despite that being like a built in feature of Apple. where Apple's like, yeah sure, we'll just treat your iPhone as if it's a webcam. That's what I've been using for all of my videos. So I thought it was dumb when, I don't know if it's Riverside or Google or the combination of the two, where like, no, you can't do this. You're not allowed to have fun. You have to use your built-in 720p camera. Anyways, Prey, 2017 I think is when it released. Man, really good game. That's one that, like I said, I put about 40 into it. That's another one that you could probably beat in about 20 hours. I just had so much fun in it. I was just screwing around with everything. I only did one playthrough. I did two endings of that one. But there's a lot more that you cannot possibly do unless you have made decisions far earlier on. Generally speaking with your build. As well as some of the missions that you do. Yeah, so there's a lot of different outcomes that you can get. But the summation of it is it is...

Isolation world, but the entire theme is the trolley problem. like none of that's really spoiler-y, I feel like if you've played those games or know anything about them and are aware of the trolley problem, you're going to understand this within the first 15 minutes of the game, maybe 20 minutes, like it's pretty prevalent. what they're going for. Fantastic game. I still haven't played Mooncrash because that's kind of... Beating Prey was kind of like, okay, I feel more accomplished so I should go retry. Sorry, looking at the blood again. I should go retry Cyberpunk 2077, because I just wanted that feeling of completion there, or least attempted completion. If Cyberpunk had still sucked, I would have stopped playing and been fine. Some of the other things, because that's Prey. I really loved it, and I feel like I'm severely discounting it by not talking about it more. But it's always on sale. It's a dirt cheap game. Again, like my lengthy playthrough of trying to overcomplicate things and be stupid about stuff took me around 40 hours. So if you're doing it on easy or if you're a lot more kind of focused, there were a couple of dumb things that I got hooked up on. I don't think the game was ever done badly, but it's man, I'm so used to so many games kind of telling you what to do. That every now and then when a game is like, do things logically, I'm waiting for like a prompt. And Prey doesn't really do that. They're just like, hey, go to this area and they don't necessarily tell you how to get there. Yeah. So animation is something that I wanted to talk about. Anime, specifically. So we've... Also watched a couple of things. know I'm really calling myself out like, don't I have an episode done? I feel bad about not having episode done. I've only spent probably closer to like 200 hours watching stuff and doing playing stuff. First thing, we'll go easy, is Frieren Frieren Beyond Journey's End is the English title, I actually don't know the Japanese title. It's from episode one, I notice, like, okay, I think I'm gonna like this. The clean lines remind me, a lot of it reminds me of Record of Lodoss War. It's definitely not a one for one, I don't even think that was ever in their mind. But they... Whatever. The main thing, they have texture. I'm sure it's digital texture, but they have texture on it. And it's noise. So like the tiniest of dots, but they are super tiny dots. So it really does look like this was something done on paper. And I wondered, like, okay, well, if it's just, you know, dots in one spot, you're, it's going to look fake. I mean, we've all seen that where you do like one overlay where it's like a stagnant overlay or maybe even it's moving, but it's moving with such a pattern that it's noticeable. But in Frieren the noise itself is never perfectly still. There's like something going on. And mean, these are the tiniest of dots. It's almost not noticeable, but there is a motion to them as as if this were on film. And then if there is noise on characters and stuff, it's independent of the background. The background is the easiest thing to see because like bright blue sky, you'll notice that there's noise in the sky. But the characters are not on the same layer as the sky. So they have their own noise thing, which is just like overlaying cels in traditional animation. And I'm sure this is all done digitally. Like it's, it is absolutely beautiful, but I'm loving this attention to detail that they're doing this kind of, you know, we've had the early two thousands or not just the early, but like the two thousands I feel like are kind of an awful time for animation because we got into digital and it's, it's as if everything that had ever been learned about animation was forgotten. Like what made animation great? There was this perfection that could be achieved in digital, that it's like, it removed kind of the heart of what makes animation animation. For me anyways, I love a lot of these imperfections and I love how the recent thing that it's small and it's dumb, but it enamored me is in watching the original Dragon Ball, when characters are moving fast, if they're close to the screen, when they leap or something, the way that they show that is there's like another cell over top and they basically take whatever the characters clothing colors or their colors are and it's almost like crayon where they like drag it across you know a cel when they're moving fast and it's like that's that's cool like how do we how do we translate that someone's moving really quickly so they found this very harsh way of doing that and it's so quaint and so much fun And then it just seemed like one day things got easy and people like, yeah, we're not going to find cool ways to do anything anymore because we're in the digital age. And we don't need to think about anything that was ever done for animation for the hundred years prior to this. So I like this like multi-layering of noise that they're doing in Frieren. It's very cool. The other thing Shangri-La Frontier, Shangri-La Frontier, it's a shonen. I recommend it, but it's very basic. It's not It doesn't fall for as many pitfalls as I've already had to suffer through with Naruto, Bleach, and even Dragon Ball Z. It's generally quick to get over a lot of the BS, but it is still shonen it's made for kids, so there's a little bit more explanatory stuff in it. The budget's not quite as high as something like Jujutsu Kaisen or, you maybe Solo Leveling. But their textures and their colors are very smartly done. a lot of shading on armor and stuff it looks airbrushed. It's not that digital gradient. So it still looks like a ton of effort. I don't know how they did it. I would love to know this, but in armor, it's... Imagine looking, you know, someone in your house, or you, you repaint your house. And you're like, wow, this looks beautiful. And like one day you're hanging up a painting or something and you look at the wall and you're like, there's streaks here. Like I never noticed these streaks before, but once you're all up on it, there's all these streaks where like in one area, maybe the brush, you know, it wasn't as thick as you thought it was, or, you know, maybe you wiped a little too far, you brushed a little too far, and it kind of took off some stuff. That's kind of what the armor looks like, the shading even of the armor, where it's like there's stuff missing, so it's not... Perfect. And also the issue with some of the digital gradient is you can almost see the lines where it's like changing, you know, shades or changing hues of the color, brightnesses of the color, whatever, you know, effects they're trying to give you. But this looks like actual, you know, airbrushing or painting on this stuff. And one of the things I just noticed about the main character, it's, you'll notice from the get-go, he's wearing a bird mask. For those of you who don't know what Shangri-La Frontier is, It's based in an MMORPG, but the main character is wearing a bird mask because why not? It's an MMO. Do something fun. And it's cool from the get-go because it's like this looks almost water-colored. It looks imperfect. And as like a quick summation through the entire series, they're not using the same copy-pasted chunk through the entire series. It's like every time you see him It's as if someone repainted this area. It is predominantly one color, but as you know with painting and like I just said, you know, maybe some bits you didn't put as much on. So it's a little bit lighter. You know, if you're painting on a a white canvas, like, I didn't paint too, too much. So it's a little bit lighter here. It's almost like a mistake. you know, it's varying degrees of saturation. And I was like, that's really neat. Like it's very fun to see something that feels real and in animation. It's all animation. They're not doing anything crazy, but there's this realism to it. And then I started noticing, and I don't know if this is a season two thing or if this did exist in season one, but I notice sometimes when the character talks, they'll move the beak - the mouth doesn't open because it's just a mask. But the beak will move where it's mounted to the bird head. And I started noticing the like there's something shifting like on top of the pattern that's there. And again kind of summating it the so around the mouth, around the eyes, around like the hairs or feathers are separate layers of this like color. So when they're doing maybe a wind animation or the eyes are moving or the mouth is moving it's shifting the layers like its own independent layers. which is cool because it's giving this very realistic like texture movement because it is two different layers moving. And again, they're all kind of, it's roughly the same color, like almost the same color. And it's so like, I love it. I've been watching the anime because it's very easy to watch. Each episode is some, there's one episode that's like under 15 minutes with all the fluff. There's fluff on the beginning and end. It's very easy to skip. So it's quick to go through, but it's fun, it's dumb, it reminds me of both .hack//SIGN and like the kids version of Solo Leveling. But now it's like, I am just interested. I am like hooked on just staring at it. And again, it's not every aspect of this game, but they are very smart with how they're doing this kind of realistic painting on, I've noticed it in the background. You know, even what are their furry characters that are rabbits, their shading is airbrushed. And while it's not the same thing, which I think is a smart decision, the shading is cleaner. Again, not that gradient, the square gradient thing. Yeah, it's really cool to look at. I'm enjoying where we're going with animation. When we got away from cel shading, like I said, there's just an art of it that's been lost because people, when you no longer have to work for something, to accomplish something. That's where I feel like lot of the creativity gets lost. So whatever they're doing, I don't know, you know, if someone is just, yeah, I think it'd be pretty cool to do this. You know, it's definitely still digitally done, but to multi-layer it, to tie the layers to independent, like it is multi-layered, like, you know, where they have just the little quick triangles of feathers in some spots. They have their own independent layers of color. So if they do so choose to be like, all right, the wind's blowing right now. If that hair is moving, you'll see there's like a outside of the feather. There's hair or there's color that's moving with it over top of the mask coloring. So cool. Yeah, I don't know if it's in the very beginning. So if you just jump to like, I don't know, episode 30 by that point, they definitely have it because I noticed it. And I think the 20s was when it finally stuck out. yeah, yeah, let's see what else there was some other stuff I wanted to do. Yeah, you know, I guess before getting off that, because that's the one I've taken the most notes on. They're pretty quick to go from point A to point B for a shounen. They're not dragging everything out. A lot of times when things drag, they do these fun boss fights. Usually like they're... Season 2, I want to say, the one that begins with a four-episode boss fight. And I thought it was fun enough. It's not as bad as stuff that I've seen in the past. We're on another episode of Dirty Pair. I'm just kind of watching it. Yeah, it's... Okay, I'm not gonna stick on that anymore. Watch it or don't. Solo leveling, lot of fun. So, you know, maybe check out Solo Leveling, but I don't really feel like going any further into that. The other thing that I wanted to do, and this is kind of, you know, the personal side of things. So this would, I guess, normally be Nacho Business, but this is meshed together. This is the burrito special for those who listen to my Neatcast episode. So a week ago, yeah, Ed was in town. And I think it was like right before he came into town or after he came into town. I don't know. When was Valentine's Day? So I decided to pick up Duolingo again and in general Japanese. And this we're gonna man big ol big ol circle I spend a lot of time researching Japanese things and It's not always easy to find High quality content out there. Sometimes it's not even easy to find like English content the the topic that I want to cover That kind of changed things for me in Battle Royale. There's one or two Japanese newspapers that released an English translation of their coverage of it, because this is a thing that happened in the early 2000s. And it's, you know, annoying sometimes where it's like, it's, AI is great, Google Translate, and a lot of these translating apps out there are doing so much of a better job. my God, it's unbelievable. If you've never looked up stuff, translated stuff before, used to, you'd be lucky to get one sentence, like reasonably translated. And now you can just hit translate and it's like all of these sentences make sense. Everything makes coherent sense. It's wild. It's great. But it is still difficult sometimes to find Information about the stuff that I'm looking into. Again, I like a lot of older stuff basically anything like 2005 and prior Honestly, good fucking luck finding anything Some of the most classic animes out there interviews have never been done with them in English Or there were very few or they were very short Like the one Satoshi Kon interview in English was like insanely short But then I found the dude had an entire blog like multiple pages of blog writing He kept his own blog and it's like that's dope. That's the rarity, but you don't get a whole lot of like modern stuff. Say with Hideaki Anno, no one in the 90s cared about the opinions of creators. They were famous in their own rights. The shows were famous. I don't think the directors were necessarily considered famous. The shows were famous. The directors didn't become famous until a little bit later and It is so difficult to find stuff. And so I was like, you know, I really should pick this up again. I had some issues the last time I did it. And I realize now after spending a little bit of time doing it again, I was being disrespectful towards the language by trying to kind of, I did Japanese years ago when I was younger, I did it for, I don't know how many years in a row, but I just didn't need it. So I gave it up and I picked up an app and I was like, okay, well I want to get through to stuff so that I can like, I need to catch up to where. to what I can still remember. And then I was just speeding through it too much. again, disrespecting the language. Y'know things gotta take time. You can do things quickly, but there's a difference between quick and rushing. And I've noticed that this time. It's like stop, chill out, and appreciate the thing that I'm doing because it is something I wanna do. You know, I've always, in doing this podcast, One of the things it does is kind of hold this thing over my head of like, yeah, you stopped learning Japanese years ago, you know, much like I got a lot of catching up to do, but I'm still covering this stuff. Like I love this stuff. And so it's, it's, there's so much joy and at the same time, so much like failure all in one, the hand in hand, it's wild. So I'm picking that up again and I've been putting time into that. Obviously not a hundred hours. over 100 hours like cyberpunk but yeah because I part of it is I want to have even better content I want to make sure that it's easier to find stuff you wouldn't believe how easy it is to find pages of stuff you know you can find stuff out there that's just all in Japanese and while AI has gotten a lot better sometimes it's like the ability to search for something is a lot harder because we're not quite there yet, you you have to kind of know kanji. You have to, you have to know the nuances of a language to be able to search for something. Most of you listening to this, I'm sure everyone listening to this has grown up with the evolution of Google and learning what it's like to like, okay, how do I find what it is that I'm looking for? Like what word is sending it off or what word do I need to add to like pinpoint exactly what I'm looking for? And Just imagine that with Japanese, a language that has three different alphabets that are used concurrently, like in the same sentence. Not easy. So I think it would be a lot cooler though to, you know, I would feel better about myself having a better grasp on Japanese. And I think it would make it lot easier to, you know, if I find interviews in Japanese, Again, language, lots of nuance and sometimes translations take the life out of that. Actually, one of my issues with Shangri-La Frontier, because again, I have a lot of the structure there of Japanese and there's one character who when she writes letters back and forth, they are obscenely, like professionally written and the subtitles are obscenely professionally written. It's so proper, but When the character speaks, it's like they have somebody else doing the subtitles because it's like I'm what they're saying on the screen is very unprofessional, but I'm not hearing those words, those conjugations. I'm not hearing the dumb down. So there's a lot of this that it's like, I think this character is speaking a lot more proper. There are moments where this character will kind of dumb it down because it's an MMO. it's... It's a person who, like, they will have their emotional reactions, and so there's those moments where their speech changes. But when they are like, okay, back in character, it's like, no, these conjugations are way different. Like, the words in the conjugations are a lot more proper than the subtitles that are showing on screen. Stuff like that. But yeah, you know, podcasting's fun. And I feel like for me, I'm learning a lot about myself. I know others have as well, you know, in very many ways. But yeah, I think that's pretty good. I think that's good for now. We're at just under an hour. I didn't have a whole lot of notes. I did a terrible job. know, someday. Someday I'll get better. And you know, the last thing, I'll do the last thing. I think I've said this before. Doing what I do, and it's just not doing what I do. It's I'm not special. It's a me thing. I find it very difficult to enjoy stuff sometimes and be a podcaster. Cause it's like, if it's taking up my time, I should do an episode on it. And I mean, technically that's what I'm doing right now. Spat a bunch of nonsense about a bunch of things that you may never play or watch. But I am still trying to find that balance of like, you know, how can I just pick up a manga and start reading and not take notes because I'm a forgetful person. So it's like, I worry where it's like, okay, well, I need to take notes so that maybe if I do an episode on it in the future, okay, but now that I'm taking notes, I may as well do a podcast episode on it. But that wasn't in my plans. You know, I've got like for this year, I don't have 12 months mapped out. I have some ideas. I have maybe like six ideas. So I've got about half of the year. kind of up in the air for what I want to do. But then this other stuff gets in the way. Sometimes it's okay.

Prologue holy shit, like it's so much fun. And that was an easy one. But then this other stuff that it's like, I just want to sit and enjoy something. It's rough on me. It's rough on my brain. Because I want to take notes to remember things. And then sometimes it gets in the way, but then sometimes I fight it by saying, well, no, I'm not going to take notes on it because this way I can enjoy it. And then it's a mental thing. I'm like fighting with myself. I'm fighting. Yeah. So it's podcasting, man. You'll learn a lot about yourself. It's, this is very much like the, the audio medium of sitting on a motorcycle and traveling the country for like 12 to 14 hours a day for several weeks. You learn a lot about yourself. Not bad stuff. I hope it's still helping me. We'll see. So future things to look out for. That Battle Royale episode, I think it's going to be approached differently. So if you're watching it with any luck, you'll see different changes in outfit or maybe I'll be smart and just wear the same outfit for the entire episode, but still choose to record it in different chunks. Yeah, so hopefully... Hopefully that works out the way I want it to so I don't overstress myself. Cause that you put yourself in that pit, man. It's hard to, sometimes it's hard to podcast when you dig your own stupid pit. That's easy to get out of, you know, you got to change sometimes, man. Speaking of change, I have no outro deuces.