Luckily I'm fairing certain AI won't try to recreate my telltale writing tick of leaving fragments of old drafts of a sentence in the final rewritten one.

Now to take a big sip of water and watch this Kaya-chan Isn't Scary trailer.

The grim thought now has to be "Is this bad because it's bad? Is it bad because it's a facsimile of bad? Or is this bad because someone's seen too many facsimiles of bad, and now thinks that's good?"

It's called Anime; and it's the new wave to surf for maximum entertainment.

The ending just about saved it for me. In general I think they get better once they realised the core audience was no longer having to be chaparoned to the movies by their parents, and could lean into the fan service and not blowing up another building.

Hagiwara definitely falls into the "author creates the coolest woman he can imagine" category of characters.

That Pioneer DVD player died in the weirdest way. It had an internal clock for reasons that escaped me, but apparently the makers did not think it was going to survive until 2008 and it died at midnight on Dec 31st 2007.

Brain said Pioneer and hands typed Panasonic there. So that's a fact check for any future biographers working on the world's most boring biograpy.

I think my modded multi-region Panasonic DVD player cost me £200 in 2001. So Fast & The Furious possibly not too far off base.

My last one was £18 from Tesco and became multiple region if you pressed four buttons while the tray was open...

There's also "How the Grouch Stole Disney" which I think is the most recent sketch book (2020, republished in 2023 with a name less likely to get the wrath of the Seuss estate)

Now I wish someone had pitched this to meatyfist in 2018 after the Okada/Omega match. Dave as Kenshiro, Bryan as Bats.

The genius gimmick of it, outside of the craft of the comic, is each chapter has the prompt for a joke, and so the reader can also join in the fun of trying to think of the punchline.

It's a rom-com about two fans of a late night comedy radio show and the jokes they send in to the show. And every chapter is pretty much them going on dates that they claim aren't dates, while everyone else around them can see the obvious attraction between them.

It feels like a comic that owes its existence to Akane-banashi in that it's about the business of comedy, but completely unlike it in tone and form.

Of course, the worst thing about it is that it is an inevitable reminder that you yourself will have likely indulged in such behaviour in the past ("why don't you watch Larry Sanders and Seinfeld instead of Friends?")