January Media Favourites/Recommendations

Hi guys!

This will be a very short post as January was entirely subsumed by me working on the new video and most of my time was spent rereading/watching things for that rather than getting to anything new!

One new thing I did manage to read, however, was Kataribanashi-hen. Last time I mentioned Kataribanashi was in my bonus arcs video; as a little recap, it's a series of short story ideas that won a competition held by 07th Expansion in the 2000s and were officially adapted and released in various formats (light novel, manga and drama CD). Some great news is that in the time since I made the video, a translation group has actually picked Kataribanashi up! I was revisiting the Mion-centric story Hinageshi-hen in prep for the video as it's the only other depiction of L5 Mion we've seen bsides in Sotsu, but I ended up sitting down and reading the whole collection, which I'd never actually done before (I bought it all quite a few years ago before I had any real Japanese proficiency, looked at the Mion panels then left my volumes somewhere to gather dust lol). There are still a few chapters forthcoming, but you can find Kataribanashi here, and I really recommend it for any Higurashi fans. There's a lot of interesting ideas and possibilities explored across these stories so, as I said in the video, I think there's something for everyone! Some favourites from what's been translated thus far besides Hinageshi-hen are Usomabushi-hen (a story about Satoshi waking up and his relationship with Shion), Limit (a very dark and tragic but nonetheless gripping story focused on the twins and Keiichi, the drama CD for which is incredible), Test of Courage (simply, the club hold a test of courage) and Thank You (focused on Rika and her relationship with Hanyuu).

Otherwise, here are a few videos I enjoyed last month:

why I 'quit' my dreams of working in animation by Anoosha Syed (I have never had a dream of working in animation but this video was randomly recommended to me and I think it has a lot of great advice pertaining to career paths in general)

Fear of Cold by Jacob Geller (Pretty much every Jacob video is a shoe-in here, I'll keep saying that he's my fave video essayist)

Time Loop Nihilism by Jacob Geller (Very easy to just think about Higurashi watching this and I wasn't the only one who thought so if the comments are anything to go by)

Why We Should NOT Look For Aliens - The Dark Forest by Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell 

Iyashikei: Will There Be a Global Healing Boom? by Screen Therapy

UTS Anime Awards: Best of 2021 by Under The Scope (I've really enjoyed these award for the past few years despite watching about 1.5 currently airing anime annually, this is the last one and it had some fittingly really poignant reflections as well as getting me excited to get around to a few of the things on this list)

That's all for now! Speak soon!